further principles in virtue of which things were actively held together in a circulating system. Boyle, in spite of his frequent comparison of the world to the Strassburg clock, piously reiterated the general concourse of Descartes, though without indicating what meaning might be contained in the phrase, and attempted an analysis of the various ways in which God might be said to exert a present providence over the fruit of his labours. It is in Huyghens and Leibniz that we first meet spirits adventurous enough openly to confine the divine activity to the first creation alone, and the latter contemptuously criticized his English contemporaries for insulting the Deity by the insinuation that he had been unable to make a perfect machine at the beginning, but was under the necessity of tinkering with it from time to time in order to keep it in running condition. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making is so imperfect according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it as a clockmaker mends his work; who must consequently be so much the more unskilful a workman, as he is oftener obliged to mend his work and set it right. According to my opinion, the same force and vigour remains always in the world, and only passes from one part of matter to another, agreeably to the laws of nature and the beautiful pre-established order. And I hold that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God." 96

Now from Newton's writings, as from Boyle's, it

" Brewster, II, 285.

U

is possible to pick passage after passage in which it seems to be assumed that after its first construction the world of nature has been quite independent of God for its continued existence and motion. The world could not have arisen out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature, "though being once formed, it may continue by those laws for many ages ""; the frame of nature may be a condensation of various ethereal spirits," and after condensation wrought into various forms, at first by the immediate hand of the Creator, and ever since by the power of nature, which, by virtue of the command, increase and multiply, became a complete imitator of the copy set her by the Protoplast "98; "in him are all things contained and moved, yet neither affects the other-God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies, bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God." "9 But when we

investigate more thoroughly we find that he, no more than Boyle, had any intention of really divorcing God from present control of, and occasional interference with, his vast engine. It is not enough to have the miracles of scripture and the achievements of spiritual grace to appeal to as evidences of continued divine contact with the realm of human affairs. God must also be given a present function in the cosmos at large; we must not allow him to abandon his toils after six days of constructive labour and leave the world of matter to its own devices. Newton's religious prejudices and his æsthetico-scientific assumptions alike arose in rebellion against such an indeterminate vacation for the Deity.

It is noticeable that Newton, in common with the whole voluntaristic British tradition in medieval and modern philosophy, tended to subordinate in God the intellect to the will; above the Creator's wisdom and knowledge is to be stressed his power and dominion. In some passages this emphasis is not present, but

"Opticks, p. 378.

Brewster I, 392.

* Principles, II, 311.

The

usually the proportions are unmistakable. famous paragraph on the nature of the Deity in the second edition of the Principia is the most striking example :

66

'This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God Tаvтоkpáτwp, or Universal Ruler ... The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God. . . . It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect... We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion; for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. . . . And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy." 100

Absurd indeed it would be to deprive a being so portrayed of present control of his creation; accordingly we find Newton assigning to God two very important and specific duties in the daily cosmic economy. For one thing, he actively prevents the fixed stars from collapsing together in the middle of space. This is not taught in the Principia; Newton there had confined himself to observing that in order to prevent such a collapse God had set these stars at immense distances from one another 101. Of course, this expedient would hardly suffice through all the ages of time, hence the reader of Newton is surprised that his author nowhere cites this difficulty as a reason. for not imputing gravity to matter beyond the reach of our experimental observations: if the fixed stars do not gravitate, obviously there is no problem. We discover, however, that Newton implicitly thinks of them as possessing gravity, for in the Opticks and

100 Principles, II, 311, ff. cf. also Opticks, p. 381.

101 Principles, II, 310, ff.

the third letter to Bentley he assigns it as one of the divine functions constantly to maintain them at their proper intervals 103. In the former note the question :

what hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another?" In the latter, after approving, in the main, Bentley's creation hypothesis, he adds: “And though the matter were divided at first into several systems, and every system by a divine power constituted like ours; yet would the outside systems descend towards the middlemost; so that this frame of things could not always subsist without a divine power to conserve it. . . ."

In the final query of the Opticks, however, we find God made responsible for a much more intricate task in applied mechanics; he is allotted the duty of providentially reforming the system of the world when the mechanism has so far run out of gear as to demand such a reformation. The active principles of the ether provide for the conservation of motion, but they do not provide sufficiently for overcoming the noted irregularities in the motion of the planets and comets, especially the latter. Due to the gradual disintegration of the comets under the influence of solar heat 103 and the retardation in their aphelia because of mutual attractions among themselves and between them and the planets; likewise due to the gradual increase in bulk of the planets, owing chiefly to the same causes, the irregularities in nature are on the increase, and the time will come when things must be set right again.

"For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move in one and the same way in orbs concentric, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase till this system wants a reformation." 104 God is scientifically required, Newton 103 Opticks, P 344; Opera, IV, 439 ff. 100 Principles, II, 293-8. 104 Opticks, p. 378 ff.

,

holds, to fulfil this need, since he is a "powerful ever-living Agent, who being in all places is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless uniform sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our will to move the parts of our own bodies. And yet we are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof, as the parts of God. He is a uniform being, void of organs, members or parts, and they are his creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his will. . . . And since space is divisible in infinitum, and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions to space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe. At least, I see nothing of contradiction in all this." 105

Newton thus apparently takes for granted a postulate of extreme importance; he assumes, with so many others who bring an æsthetic interest into science, that the incomparable order, beauty, and harmony which characterizes the celestial realm in the large, is to be eternally preserved. It will not be preserved by space, time, mass, and ether alone; its preservation requires the continued exertion of that divine will which freely chose this order and harmony as the ends of his first creative toil. From the Protoplast of the whole, God has now descended to become a category among other categories; the facts of continued order, system, and uniformity as observed in the world, are inexplicable apart from him.

(C) The Historical Relations of Newton's Theism Contrast this Newtonian teleology with that of the scholastic system. For the latter, God was the final

105 Opticks, P. 379.