Was Newton Familiar with Spinoza? (Yes, of course!)

[A] Even arguments for a Being if not taken from Phænomena are slippery & serve only for ostentation. [B] An Atheist will allow that there is a Being absolutely perfect, necessarily existing & the author of  mankind & call it Nature: & [B*] if you talk of infinite wisdom or of any perfection more then he allows to {say} in {natur} heel reccon at a chemæra & tell you that you have the notion of finite or limited wisdom from what you find in your self & are able  of your self to  {prefin} the word no{t}  or more then to any verb or adjective & without the existence of wisdome not limited or [C] wisdome more then finite to understand the meaning of the  phrase as easily as Mathematicians understand  what is meant by an infinite line or an infinite area.  [D] And heel may tell you further that the Author of mankind was destitute of wisdome & designe because there are no final causes & [E] and that matter <is space & therefore necessarily existing & having always the same quantity of motion, would> in infinite time would run through all variety of forms... Isaac Newton Library Ms. Add. 3970 (B), f. 619r-v. [Letters added to facilitate discussion]+ 

Spinoza and Newton shared some overlapping interests, most obviously in optics, political theology, biblical philology, as well a shared initial immersion of and ultimate rejection of Cartesian physics. The optical controversy that made Newton famous occurred in the early 1670s during Spinoza's life, although we have no evidence that Spinoza followed the debate. Spinoza was known among many members of the Royal Society, including its secretary, and several of Newton's close acquaintances, including More and Clarke, responded to Spinoza's works throughout Newton's life. As Rosalie Colie has shown countless Boyle lecturers attempted refutations of Spinoza. Yet, to the best of my knowledge Newton never mentions Spinoza or Spinozism explicitly. During the past year, I convinced myself that Newton responds to the threat (of a variant) of Spinozism, in part due to Toland (a target of Clarke), with an argument added to the third (1726) edition of the General Scholium: "No variation of things arises from blind metaphysical necessity, which must be the same always and everywhere." (Here and here are two video presentations of the paper in which I defend this claim.)

But I was lacking a 'smoking gun' that Newton had a good sense of Spinozism. Then the great Alison Peterman called my attention to the passage quoted above. This passage is discussed in Newton scholarship. Even very good scholars – Snobelen and Anstey -- tend to claim that Newton is targeting Descartes/Cartesianism in it. This mistake is understandable because Newton does indeed criticize "the Cartesians" earlier in the page of the notebook, and Descartes had famously rejected final causes in physics. While claim [A] could indeed target both Descartes and Spinoza, claims [B, D-E], in particular, target Spinozism and not Cartesianism (and [C] may also do so).

For, in [B] Newton is characterizing a version of Spinoza's famous Deus sive Natura doctrine. As the eminent Dutch scholar, Piet Steenbakkers, has argued, unlike many other doctrines found in Spinoza, it is not just characteristic of Spinoza, but (nearly) unique to him. It's true that [B*] sounds vaguely Cartesian and echoes things we might read in the Meditations (a book Newton was very familiar with). But crucially, when Newton explicitly discussed Descartes's account of indeterminately large (as distinct from infinite space), Newton insists that Descartes avoids atheism (and he ascribes to Descartes a "fear" of it): "if he should consider space infinite, it would perhaps become God because of the perfection of infinity." (I thank Andrew Janiak for reminding me of this point!) So, I see in B* an allusion to Spinoza's genealogy of error in which God is an anthropomorphic projection. Of course, while many modern commentators would be disinclined to treat Spinoza's pantheism as a species of atheism (but see Nadler), this was quite normal in the early modern period, especially among Spinoza's critics (again see Nadler).

Moreover, the denial of general final causes [D] is a clear allusion to Spinoza's infamous doctrine of Appendix 1 of the Ethics whereas Descartes always remained agnostic about this. Finally, [E] is a clear allusion to Spinoza's doctrines of 1p16 and 1p28 of the Ethics, which entail an infinite time and matter's eternity with all variety of forms. By contrast, even in the creation myth of chapters 7-8 of the posthumously published The World, where Descartes is careful to distinguish nature from God, Descartes still requires God to get the whole thing started and impose laws on matter. It's true that the idea that "quantity of motion" is preserved is Cartesian, but it is not incompatible with a Spinozist physicists (as many commentators have noticed—here's a famous paper by Garrett). It's not uncommon for Newtonians to think that Spinoza follows Descartes in this respect (see MacLaurin, and my treatment of MacLaurin here).

Finally, and more speculatively, I take [C] (in the context of the sentence starting at [B*] to be a nod to Spinoza's famous criticism of the mathematical treatment of infinity in the "Letter on the Infinite." For, there Spinoza denies that the mathematicians actually tend to be confused when they are talking about infinities. Spinoza's criticism of the mathematization of nature was, of course, infamous among folk in Newton's circle.

So, does this prove that Newton had read Spinoza? No, of course, not. But it shows that Newton was familiar with the highly technical, textual and philosophical criticism by some of Spinoza's fiercest critics, including (almost certainly) Clarke's Demonstration, which anticipates much of the General Scholium.

 

+As it happens page 619v is missing at the Newton project. I am grateful to Steve Snobelen for sharing his transcription of the ms with me. (For another transcription see Ducheyne.)