Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God. Every man, insofar as he is a thing that has senses, is one and the same man throughout his lifetime in each and every organ of his senses. God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially, for active power [virtus] cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him, experiences nothing from the motions of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God's omnipresence.---Newton, "General Scholium" Principia, translated by Cohen & Whitman (1999), 941-942
The first three sentences of the quoted paragraph were inserted into the third (and final) edition of the Principia (while the rest was added to the second edition). They have become subject of intense scholarly scrutiny because of the light they might share on the constraints on any possible explanation of the cause of gravity. So, for example, my good friend Andrew Janiak thinks that in the quoted passage there is a hidden premise that 'a substance cannot act where it is not substantially present' and this reinforces his argument that Newton (always) rejects unmediated action at a distance (Hylarie Kochiras has also argued this; in context my work is one of their targets.) Here I want to bracket that debate (but will return at the very end to it), and reflect a bit on Newton's underlying metaphysics of mind and mind-body interaction.
In context, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, Newton has just asserted that God is eternal and omnipresent ("will not be never or nowhere," (941)) And in the paragraph following the one just quoted he claims that "the supreme God necessarily exists, and by the same necessity he is always and everywhere." (942; emphasis in original) That is to say, Newton's God is immanent in the universe. Quite a few more remarks in the General Scholium suggest this.
And, in fact, as 'the same necessity' suggests Newton's God's relationship to space and time is very tight (I would say an internal relation). Rather than creating space and time, by an act of will, they exist when he exists in virtue of the same necessity. How to think of Newton's modal metaphysics here is no simple matter (and I have devoted some space to it recall here; here; here). In an early text, De Gravitatione, Newton had tried to characterize this relationship in terms of an emanation doctrine, and there, too, it signals that space and time are not created (or so I argue here).
It's crucial to Newton's general argument that space and time are not nothing or merely ideal or useful conventions. (In De Gravitatione he makes a point of emphasizing this. In the General Scholium it's treated as self-evident.) And it follows from this that there are structural features of the universe (space and time) that are as infinite and eternal as God is. My interest is in trying to characterize one of the relationships between sentience and this spatial-temporal structure.
Now, a few paragraphs before Newton had explicitly denied, and he added a second denial to the third edition, that God is a world soul (940). But a natural reading of the quoted passage at the top is that God is sentient with a soul. (I return to this below.) And such ensouled sentience makes a person. But unlike say, in Descartes' metaphysics, Newtonian ensouled sentience can be spread out in space and time. Yet, like a Cartesian soul, such a Newtonian ensouled sentience does not, despite existing in space and time, itself have parts or is even divisible.
As an aside, my own view is that Newton is a substance monist. For Newton, a substance is a directed source of activity, that is an agent.* (Janiak and I agree about this. But we differ on the monism.) And that the only truly active agent in his metaphysics is God. I grant that Newton uses the plural 'substances' (942) in order to deny, in Lockean fashion, that we have knowledge of their essences (and even less of God's essence). But when he uses 'substances' he means it in the more innocent sense of a 'material entity' not an 'agent.'
Now, an obvious way to make sense of the contours of Newton's position on ensouled sentience in the General Scholium is that he thinks sentience is a kind of emergent property of matter immanent in nature. And so Newton articulates a kind of property dualism.+ This works well for what he says about human persons.
In fact, Newton returns to the question of ensouled sentience in his fascinating closing paragraph of the General Scholium:
A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; by its force and actions, the particles of bodies attract one another at very small distances and cohere when they become contiguous; and electrical [i.e., electrified] bodies act at greater distances, repelling as well as attracting neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words; furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. (943-944)
As Dempsey has argued, building on I.B. Cohen's interpretation of some draft manuscripts while Newton was developing a response to Leibniz (published in 1715 Account), Newton explicitly refers to experiments done by Hauksbee. Here it looks like Newton is sketching how sentience itself is ground in a powerful, "very subtle spirit" that pervades bodies. In particular, the presence of this spirit helps explain the exciting of sensation in beings like us. Now ''spirit" is a fluid (we use it in that sense when we describe liquor as 'spirits'). And for Newton a kind of (subtle) matter. So, this fits with the emergentism I attribute to Newton. (To be sure, I agree with Stein (2002) and Dempsey that Newton viewed this as a research program because we simply know to little about the nature of mind--so my claim is not meant to be doctrinaire, although Newton is an adamant critic of some positions he rejects.)
In particular, Dempsey calls attention to a passage, "if this spirit may receive impressions from light and convey them into the sensiorium & there act upon that substance which sees & thinks, that substance may mutually act upon this spirit for causing animal motions’" (quoted by Cohen in Newton 1999: 282) I agree with Dempsey that Newton thinks this spirit is a key element in mental causation. But the most natural reading of the passage is, I think, that this subtle spirit is a mechanism by which mental causation takes place. It is not obvious that this spirit also helps constitute or ground the substance which sees and thinks.
Interestingly, Dempsey argues it is likely that Newton is "not here endorsing the independent existence of the mind, but rather is distinguishing it from the organs of sense and the brain. What is more, one straightforward explanation of the natural interaction of this spirit and the mind is precisely that the mind and the spirit with which it interacts are quite similar in nature." (Dempsey 2006: 438) And this fits very nicely with my own emergentist reading. But as I note this very monistic interpretation of Newton's metaphysics of mind is rather speculative.
In fact, I often read Newton in Spinozistic fashion in which God is the one and only substance. (This is, in fact, Clarke's position in 1704, which is what made him a juicy target for Leibniz.) And the universal quantifier in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph, seems to suggest that what Newton says about human minds must fit also God's mind: "Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person." And if this 'every' includes God, this suggest that God is not just immanent nature, but also material (e.g., "motions").
But I have always hesitated about this because in the General Scholium Newton rejects, as I noted above, the idea of God as a world soul and he writes shortly hereafter that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). So, I think it is not obvious that God's sentience is an emergent property of matter. For (a) God's sentience cannot be grounded in such matter, and (b) in various places, Newton seems to suggest that conceptually and temporally God precedes matter. (In the General Scholium that is not explicit, but it is a kind of implication of his claims about the designed nature of the visible universe.) And so if this is right God's sentience and personhood is not ensouled. But something altogether mysterious.
The passage in which I take him to reject God as the world soul reads as follows:
But, in looking again He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Newton adds a note: 'that is, universal ruler.'] For "god" is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body fas is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. (940)
Drawing on early work by Dobbs, Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion of anima mundi. The effect of this Lipsian reading is that God remains immanent to nature, but is not ground in body.
In re-reading the passage, it is not obvious to me anymore that Newton rejects conceiving God as the world soul as such. Rather, he is rejecting analyzing God's rule in terms of the world soul because it does not capture the hierarchical nature of God's dominion.
So, it is possible that Newton thinks God's sentience in the pervasive more subtle (electric) fluid/spirit. Even so, given that Newton is explicit that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). it seems unlikely that we're supposed to read Newton as claiming that God's sentience is ground in, and emergent of a, subtle electric (etc.) spirit.++ So, I don't think it is correct to treat God's sentience in terms of emergent properties (in the way, say, Spinoza's parallelism encourages).** Even though Newton and Spinoza agree that thought is a something like an attribute of substance.
So, where does this leave us? First, rather than seeing Newton as relying on a principle of local action, he is articulating an account of the relationship between sentience and body. For human sentience this is ground in a kind of emergent quality of body, especially a subtle fluid. Second, God is immanent in nature, and features of his existence can be derived from the study of nature. Ordinarily,** bodies are not hindered by his presence, and "he does not act on them nor they on him." In so far as God does interact with the bodies and spirits in nature this is fundamentally mysterious, as mysterious as his substance. In fact, in a passage that echoes a skeptical trope in Locke, Newton really stresses the fact that we really have no epistemic access, not even analogical, to God's sentience.
he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the ways in which the most wise God senses and understands all things. (942)
Third, rather than positing a principle of local action, Newton is developing an account of sentience that may be illuminated by experiments on electricity. But leaves us without any resources to make claims about God's agency.
*I use 'directed' to distinguish it from natural principles that are active, but have no self-directed teleological orientation in their activity.
+In a very paper, Geoff Gorham argues that an De Gravitatione all minds are "absolutely incorporeal and indivisible substances." And so that Newton is a kind of substance dualist (just not a Cartesian one). See my alternative here. Crucially, mind is necessary for, and co-extensive with, activities in the body and, simultaneously, body is intrinsically perceptible by minds.
++Interestingly, this spirit may be the same spirit that Newton mentions at the end of the Principia proper (recall), where he discusses the role of comets in the cosmic economy, and which is a kind of life-giving source: "most subtle and most excellent part of our air, and which is required for the life of all things" (926). Cesare Pastorino has written very helpfully on this here.
**A famous passage in the queries to the Optics suggests to many that Newton thought God could intervene in restoring the planetary motions.
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