In The History of England, Hume writes: "While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.” As I have argued elsewhere, this quote reveals crucial details about Hume's attitude toward Newton and the nature of skepticism. But I have recently come to believe that Hume's target is the use made of Newton and his achievements the argument for God's Benevolent Design in Samuel Clarke's Anti-Spinozistic (1705) ADemonstration of the being and attributes of God: more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza and their followers.
While there is much more to be said about Hume's views on the mechanical philosophy, here Hume treats Newton's account as a refutation of the mechanical philosophy. However, Hume interpret Newton's achievement not as a decisive advance in knowledge of nature but, instead, as decisive evidence for the claim that ("thereby") nature will remain unknowable in principle. Unlike many senior Hume scholars, I do not treat such skepticism as somehow Newton's position. Hume understands Newton's success as a double-edged sword: even if Newton removed a source of error and/or enlarged our knowledge, he did so at the cost of undermining any hope of establishing what we might call am (intelligible) “final theory.” Hume views Newton as successfully falsifying the Mechanists' program, while Hume hedges his bets on offering any evaluation of the positive side of Newton's system (notice also the grudging use of “seemed”).
Now Paul Russell (2008) The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion, Oxford University Press alerted me to the fact that many of Hume's arguments elsewhere might have Clarke and, especially, Clarke's use of Newton/mathematical physics as an authority to settle debate within (the theologically loaded parts of) philosophy [something I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy"], as their targets. The quoted passage from the History of England may also fit Russell's general thesis (which concerned the Treatise in particular). Consider the following passage from Clarke:
What would [Cicero] have said [against the Epicureans], if he had known the Modern Discoveries in astronomy? The Immense Greatness of the World; (I mean of that Part of it, which falls under our Observation;) which is Now known to be as much Greater than what in his Time they imagined it to Be, as the World itself, according to their System, was Greater than Archimedes’s Sphere? The Exquisite Regularity of all the Planets Motions, without Epicycles, Stations, Retrogradations, or any other Deviation or Confusion whatsoever? The inexpressible nicety of the Adjustment of the Primary Velocity and Original Direction of the Annual Motion of the Planets, with their Distance from the Central Body and their force of Gravitation towards it. The wonderful Proportion of the Diurnal Motion of the Earth and other Planets about their own Centers; for the Distinction of Light and Darkness, without that monstrously disproportionate Whirling of the whole heavens, which the Antient Astronomers were forced to suppose? The exact Accommodating the * Densities of the Planets, to which their Distances from the Sun, and consequently to the Proportion of Heat which each of them is to bear respectively; so that neither Those which are nearest to the Sun, are destroyed by the Heat; nor Those which are farthest off, by the Cold; but each one enjoys a Temperature suited to its proper Uses as the Earth is to ours? The Admirable Order, Number and Usefulness, of the several Moons, (as I may very properly call them,) never dreamt of by Antiquity, but now by the Help of Telescopes clearly and distinctly seen to move about their respective Planets; and whole Motions are so [ex]actly Known, that their very Eclipses are as certainly calculated and foretold, as those of our own Moon?...Certainly Atheism, which Then was infinitely unable to withstand the Arguments drawn from this Topick; must Now, upon the additional Strength of these later Observations, which are every one an unanswerable Proof of the incomprehensible Wisdom of the Creator, be utterly ashamed to show its Head. We Now see with how great reason the Author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus after he had described the Beauty of the Sun and Stars, and all the then Visible Works o God in Heaven and Earth, concluded, ch. 43, v 32, (as We after all the Discoveries of later Ages, may no doubt still truly say,) There are yet hid greater things than these and we have seen but a few of his Works.” (Emphases by Clarke)
There is a lot going on in Clarke's use of Newton to reinforce the Ciceronian argument against the the modern followers of Epicurus (that is the Hobbesians and Spinozists ). First, at * Clarke quotes Principia Book 3, Proposition 8, Corollary 4 (in Latin, “Hence, God placed the planets at different distances from the Sun so that they might enjoy greater or smaller heat of the Sun according to their degrees of density”). It is the only place in first edition of Newton’s Principia (1687) where God is explicitly mentioned. The passage was removed from later editions. (In Newton’s posthumous (1728) A Treatise on the System of the World (the original draft of Part III of the Principia that Newton suppressed because as he said in the preface to part III of the Principia, he wished to avoid controversy), God’s presence in the argument is presented as a conditional. )But not before the argument was noted by Huygens; he praises it (as I.B. Cohen noted) in his Discourse on Gravity (1690), and he may have been encouraged by it to expound a cosmology with a universe teeming with life in the Cosmotheoros (1698). The argument also resurfaces in Kant’s Universal Natural History , where it is naturalized (and Newton accussed of the "greatest contradictions.") It is unclear if Kant learned of it by reading the first edition of the Principia or Clarke (or some other indirect source).
Now, second, the main point of Clarke's argument is to deploy the amazing precision and empirical success of modern mathematical physics, which reveals the greatest amount of regularity and apparent design in nature, as an "a posteriori" argument for a Designing God. Spinoza was, of course, the greatest critic of such arguments for design (see Ethics, Appendix 1). Now the book as a whole offers many very interesting arguments against Spinoza's explicit positions, but here Spinoza is only mentioned obliquely. When it comes to knowledge of nature, rather than using clear and distinct intellectual perception, we need to see clearly and distinctly with telescopes! (Spinoza was of course a great craftsman of telescopic lenses). Elsewhere I discuss the debate between Clarke and Spinoza over what mathematical physics can and can't provide evidence for.
Third, the only thing we may not be able to learn is the "nicety" of God's "Adjustment of the Primary Velocity and Original Direction of the Annual Motion of the Planets" at the origin of the universe. But the main point of the passage is revealed by Clarke's use of Ecclesiasticus 43:32. For Clarke this is the predictive assertion that there is still much to learn about nature. In context, Clarke treats Newton's discoveries as evidence of our progress in knowledge and as a promise that there is much more to learn. According to Clarke the Bible teaches us that nature is knowable and that inquiry is open ended. As Newton writes in the “Preface” to the (first edition of the Principia, “the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one” (emphasis added). (Clarke, thus, makes the Bible a book of Modern philosophy!) And Newton reaffirms this stance in his great, fourth rule of reasoning (added to the final edition of the Principia long after Clarke's Demonstration): "In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions."
Finally, Clarke was not the only careful reader of Cicero's De Natura Deorum (which is quoted immediately before the passage that I quoted above). Some other time I will discuss how Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, appears to affirm Clarke's argument, while undermining its presuppositions subtly. But here I return to David Hume, who spent a good part of his adult life reflecting on Cicero's great culminating in his Dialogues (which are, of course, a relentless attack on Clarke's arguments). Now, despite the fact that Hume and Newton are clearly both fallibilists about inquiry, Hume lacks an equivalent of Newton's fourth rule (as I had remarked elsewhere). But what I had never clearly seen before is that the wording of the passage in Hume's History of England contrasts with the open-ended optimism of Clarke's reading of Ecclesiasticus 43:32. By reversing the meaning of what Newton has shown, Hume resists the conclusion that Ecllesiasticus 43 leads up to in the very next, final line: "For the Lord hath made all things; and to the godly hath he given wisdom."
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