Newton, Isaac | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The Principia is the grandest achievement of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy and one of the most revolutionary books in the history of science. Newton's Opticks (1704) codified earlier research and placed optics on a firm footing; later editions helped establish an experimental agenda for the subsequent decades. As President of the Royal Society, Newton reinvigorated the organization's experimental program. His first curator of experiments, Francis Hauksbee, Sr., developed an electro-static machine that helped foster the study of electricity in the eighteenth-century. His second curator, John Theophilus Desaguliers, exemplified the Baconian ideal of producing useful knowledge through liaising with proto-industrialists, developing mine ventilation machines, and during his employment as a waterworks engineer on the Thames.

Enlightenment Image and Correction

Despite his popular association with a deterministic and purely mechanical cosmos, Newton's image as a rationalist proponent of a clockwork universe is a wishful construction of Enlightenment apologists who re-crafted him in their own mold. Newton's natural philosophical ethos conforms more closely to Renaissance ideals. He was committed to the goal of recovering the prisca sapientia (ancient wisdom), believing that the ancients possessed superior forms of knowledge that could and should be recovered.

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