Introduction

chapter 1 Introduction

Elizabethanne Boran

To avoid being baited by little Smatterers in Mathematicks… he design- edly made his Principia abstruse; but yet so as to be understood by able Mathematicians.1 ⸪

This quotation about Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in a letter of William Derham (1657–1735) to John Conduitt (1688–1737) amply summarises the initial diffi- culty facing readers of the Principia. It was not a reader-friendly book; nor was it designed to be. Many early readers (able mathematicians included) com- plained that it was too difficult, even for them. Newton was well aware of this and, while emphasizing the need of a good mathematical education to fully understand the Principia, he suggested the following shortcut to the main ar- guments: “When you have read the first 60 pages, pass on to ye 3d Book & when you see the design of that you may turn back to such Propositions as you shall have a desire to know, or peruse the whole in order if you think fit.”2 The papers in this collection focus on the various ways the works of Isaac Newton were read, interpreted and challenged in early modern Europe during the eighteenth century. The vast majority of the papers were given at an inter- national conference, held in the Edward Worth Library, Dublin, in 2012 to mark Dublin’s year as City of Science and, also, to draw attention to the importance of the Newtonian holdings at the Edward Worth Library. The aim was to shed light on how Newtonian works were introduced to peripheral audiences – peripheral in both geographic and ideological senses – and to explore the often complex re-interpretations and re-readings of Newton which took place as a

1 William Derham to John Conduitt, 8 July 1733, King’s College, Cambridge: Keynes ms 133, 10. 2 Sir Isaac Newton, “Paper of Directions given by Newton to [Richard] Bentley respecting the books to be read before endeavouring to read and understand the Principia (c. 1691)”, in Sir Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H.W. Turnbull (Cambridge: University Press, 1961), iii, 156.

204209 2 Boran result; re-interpretations which ultimately led to a re-fashioning of views of the “Prince of Geometricians” himself.3 The choice of Dublin, and more specifically the Edward Worth Library, was particularly appropriate, not least because, like other areas explored in this collection, Dublin as a locus for the reception and reading of Newton, has all too often been dismissed as a Newtonian back-water. And yet pages of the Prin- cipia were being read quite literally hot off the press in Dublin in 1687, avidly examined by members of the Dublin Philosophical Society, such as Charles Willoughby (c. 1630–1694), William Molyneux (1656–1698), and St George Ashe (1658–1718). Thus, writing to Edmond Halley (1656–1742) on 7 July 1687, Moly- neux thanks him for “that part of Mr Newton’s book which you sent me”, a work he judged “incomparable”.4 His colleague, St George Ashe, writing to Halley eight days later, re-iterated Molyneux’s thanks and went on to explain that this first reading was already leading to new experiments.5 The Dublin Philosophi- cal Society, a smaller sister of the Royal Society, had been set up in 1682 as an informal discussion group under the auspices of Molyneux “to discourse of philosophy, mathematicks, and other polite literature”.6 Modelling themselves on the Royal Society, they appointed William Petty (1623–1687) as their first president in 1683, with Molyneux acting as both secretary and treasurer and, until the turbulent political period of the later 1680s, met regularly to investi- gate a host of learned issues. Many of the founding members were physicians and it is no surprise that medical topics were an avid source of inspiration for them; equally, given Molyneux’s and St George Ashe’s interests in mathemat- ics and optics, the group was inevitably drawn to the Transactions of the Royal Society and to Newton’s works. Molyneux, the guiding force behind the society in its early years (and af- ter its re-foundation in 1693 following the Williamite wars), continued to cor- respond with his Royal Society contacts about the Principia. Writing to Hans

3 Herman Boerhaave, “Discourse on the Achievement of Certainty in Physics”, in Elze Kegel- Brinkgreve and Antonie M. Luyendijk-Elshout (eds.), Boerhaave’s Orations (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 162. 4 K. Theodore Hoppen (ed.) Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683–1709, 2 vols (Dublin: Irish Manuscript Commission, 2008), ii, 654. 5 Ibid. ii, 656: “In looking over a sheet of Mr Newton’s excellent book (which I hear by your means is publishing) I observed that he affirms the whole use and efficacy of engines and mechanic inventions to consist in increasing the power or force by diminishing the velocity; upon which I showed Mr Molyneux and other friends the contrivance of an engine (the hint I remember I had from some of the Acta Erudit.), which, as it infinitely facilitated the raising any weight, so likewise it proportionately increased the velocity of its motion.” 6 K. Theodore Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 23.

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