INTRODUCTION

In 1687, Isaac Newton outlined his theory of time in a ‘Scholium’ to Part One of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. He argued that ‘the common people’ conceive the quantities of time, space and motion “under no other notions but from the relation that they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.”1 Accordingly, he distinguished time into its absolute and relative forms: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time . . .2 Newton’s theory of absolute time distinguished time’s real nature from our imperfect, sensible apprehension or measurement of it, and made it wholly independent of anything ‘external’, such as motion. Another significant fea- ture of Newtonian absolute time, however, was the way in which it treated the connection accepted by many of Newton’s philosophical predecessors between time and the soul. Newton’s account in the Principia essentially implied a very limited relationship between time and the human soul. He separated the real, ‘absolute’ nature of time from sensible objects and also, by extension, from the act of sensing and from other mental pro- cesses. Even in his discussion of what he called ‘relative, apparent, and common time’, he offered a fairly cursory account of how we become aware of time (that is, of how the soul perceives time), and took no account at all of whether time is involved in the operations of the soul itself. In many respects, Newton’s discussion of time denied that either the way in which the human soul perceived or internalized time or the contribution made by the soul to the nature of time itself were problematic or philosophi- cally interesting issues. Although Newton’s account of time was challenged

1 Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 408. 2 Newton, Principia, 408. 2 introduction by many of his contemporaries, including Leibniz, the relatively confined nature of his interest in these questions has influenced most subsequent accounts of the concept of time in the seventeenth ­century.3 In a sense, then, the Principia took the soul out of time. Newton’s treatment of time has been interrogated from a variety of perspectives.4 Many modern scholars have also attempted to identify pre- cursors of Newtonian absolute time in the work of a number of authors from the late sixteenth century onwards,5 such as Bernardino Telesio’s De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (1570), Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de universis philosophia (1591), Pierre Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum, Walter Charleton’s Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), and Isaac Barrow’s Lectiones geometricae (1670).6 In different ways, all of these early modern authors advanced the position that time is an imma- terial entity that is parallel to space, and which flows independently and absolutely. There has, however, been a strong tendency amongst histori- ans of philosophy and of physics to imply that this model was the only­ significant development within theories of time in the seventeenth

3 See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, ed. H.G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956); on the context of the Leibniz-Clarke debates, see Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72: 2 (1981): 187–215. 4 See inter alia Robert Di Salle, “Newton’s Philosophical Analysis of Space and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–56; Robert Rynasiewicz, “By Their Proper- ties, Causes and Effects: Newton’s Scholium on Time, Space, Place and Motion: Part I: The Text,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 133–153; Idem., “By Their Prop- erties, Causes and Effects: Newton’s Scholium on Time, Space, Place and Motion: Part II: The Context,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 295–321; Howard Stein, “Newtonian Space-Time,” in The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton 1666–1966, ed. Robert Palter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). 5 Steffen Ducheyne, “J.B. Van Helmont’s De Tempore as an Influence on Isaac Newton’s Doctrine of Absolute Time,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 90: 2 (2008): 216–228; Piero Ariotti, “Toward Absolute Time: The Undermining and Refutation of the Aristotelian Concept of Time in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Annals of Science 20 (1973): 31–50; Idem., “Toward Absolute Time: Continental Antecedents of the Newtonian Concep- tion of Absolute Time,” Studi internazionale di filosofia 5 (1973): 141–168. 6 Sarah Hutton, “Some Renaissance Critiques of Aristotle’s Theory of Time,” Annals of Science 34 (1977): 354–363; Bernard Rochot, “Sur les notions de temps et d’espace chez quelques auteurs du XVIIe siècle, notamment Gassendi et Barrow,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 9 (1956): 97–104; Karl Schuhmann, “Zur Entstehung des neuzeitlichen Zeitbegriffs: Telesio, Patrizi, Gassendi,” in Karl Schuhmann. Selected Papers on Renaissance Philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes, ed. Piet Steenbakkers and Cees Leijenhorst (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 73–98. On Newton and Barrow, see Mordechai Feingold, “Newton, Leibniz, and Barrow Too: An Attempt at a Reinterpretation,” Isis 84: 2 (1993): 310–338.