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  • III.2 - The Queries to the Optice (1706)

  • from Part III - Isaac Newton and the Emancipation of Natural Philosophy from Metaphysics
  • Dmitri Levitin, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Kingdom of Darkness
    Published online:
    23 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022, pp 653-702

  • Summary

    This chapter focusses on the famous queries appended to the Latin Optice, in which Newton made some notorious – but also very ambiguous – statements about space being akin to the divine sensorium. Many commentators have speculated about how this implied a metaphysics of divine omnipresence. It is shown that this was not the case – rather, Newton was developing the anti-metaphysical analogical natural theology he had first conceived in the 1690s. But now, his argument took on a new, polemically anti-Cartesian dimension. This was the result of the influence on him of some of his followers, above all Samuel Clare, the translator of the English Opticks. Indeed, there is very strong circumstantial evidence that Clarke was actively involved in the composition of the new material in the Optice queries, or at least their natural-theological material. That material also owed a debt to another early Newtonian, the Scottish physician George Cheyne.