provided for, as their welfare is consistent with the general laws settled by God in the universe, and to such of those ends as he proposed to himself in framing it, as are more considerable than the welfare of those particular creatures." 107 At the same time consistency with the general laws just mentioned must not be pressed, for "this doctrine [is_not] inconsistent with the belief of any true miracle, for it supposes the ordinary and settled course of nature to be maintained, without at all denying, that the most free and powerful Author of nature is able, whenever He thinks fit, to suspend, alter, or contradict those laws of motion, which he alone at first established and which need his perpetual concourse to be upheld."108 God might thus at any time, "by withholding his concourse, or changing these laws of motion, that depend entirely upon his will... invalidate most, if not all, the axioms of natural philosophy."100 Hence, although God ordinarily confines the motions of matter to the regular laws originally established in it, yet he has by no means surrendered his right to change its operations in the interest of some new or special purpose. What types of event does Boyle intend to include under the head of miracles in this sense? First, of course, the miracles recorded in revelation. It will not follow from the existence of regular laws in nature," that the fire must necessarily burn Daniel's three companions or their clothes, that were cast... into the midst of a burning fiery furnace, when the author of nature was pleased to withdraw his concourse to the operation of the flames, or supernaturally to defend against them the bodies that were exposed to them."10 Secondly, Boyle counts a miracle the union of a rational, immortal soul with a physical body at birth 111; thirdly, prayer for special help in times of sickness he does not think it becomes a 107 Boyle, V, 251, ff. 108 Boyle, V, 414. 10. Boyle, IV, 161, ff. Christian philosopher to pronounce hopeless 112; and fourthly, he is disposed to think that there are many more irregularities in the cosmos at large than we are tempted to admit. "When I consider the nature of brute matter, and the vastness of the bodies that make up the world, the strange variety of those bodies that the earth does comprise, and others of them may not absurdly be presumed to contain ; and when I likewise consider the fluidity of that vast interstellar part of the world wherein these globes swim; I cannot but suspect that there may be less of accurateness, and of constant regularity, than we have been taught to believe in the structure of the universe." 113 As examples he cites the spots on the sun, which he interprets as an irregular vomiting of quantities of opaque matter; and the comets, which were a great matter of wonder and mystery to all scientists of the day. Boyle holds it more satisfactory to attribute these types of event to the immediate interposition of the divine author of things, than to call in some third entity or subordinate being, such as nature. God doubtless has ends far transcending those which are revealed in the harmonious system discovered by science. It is noticeable, however, that Boyle is eager not to overstress the importance of miracles; the main argument for God and providence is the exquisite structure and symmetry of the world-regularity, not irregularity—and at moments when his scientific passion is uppermost, he almost denies everything he has claimed for the present direct interposition of the deity. If God" but continue his ordinary and general concourse, there will be no necessity of extraordinary interpositions, which may reduce him to seem, as it were, to play after games; all those exigencies, upon whose account philosophers and physicians seem to 111 Boyle, V, 216, ff. 11 Boyle, III 322. have devised what they call nature, being foreseen and provided for in the first fabric of the world; so that mere matter so ordered, shall . . . do all . . according to the catholic laws of motion."114 The universe is distinctly not a puppet, whose strings have to be pulled now and again, but "it is like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasburg, where all things are so skilfully contrived, that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer's first design, and the motions. . . do not require the peculiar interposing of the artificer, or any intelligent agent employed by him, but perform their functions upon particular occasions, by virtue of the general and primitive contrivance of the whole engine." This reinterpretation of theism, which we meet with in Boyle, to the end of relating it definitely to the new scientific conception of the world, we shall find repeated almost point for point in Newton, save for being shorn of its most extreme ambiguities. The only other influences at all comparable in this aspect of Newton's philosophy were those of More and of the theosophist, Jacob Boehme. The former was Newton's colleague at Cambridge, and the latter, whom he read copiously, must have strengthened his conviction that the universe as a whole is not mechanically but only religiously explicable. We are now equipped to consider, in somewhat fuller detail than has been devoted to any thinker thus far, the metaphysics of the man whose epoch-making conquests for science enabled him to turn the bulk of the convictions so far reached from still dubitable assumptions into almost hallowed axioms for the subsequent course of modern thought. Before we do so, however, let us summarize the central steps in the remarkable movement we have been tracing. 114 Boyle, V, 163. (I) Summary of the Pre-Newtonian Development Copernicus dared to attribute to the earth a diurnal motion on its axis and an annual motion around the sun, because of the greater mathematical simplicity of the astronomical system thus attained, a venture whose metaphysical implications he could accept because of the widespread revival in his day of the Platonic-Pythagorean conception of the universe, and which was suggested to his mind by the preceding developments in the science of mathematics. Kepler, moved by the beauty and harmony of this orderly system of the universe and by the satisfaction it accorded his adolescent deification of the sun, devoted himself to the search for additional geometrical harmonies among the exact data compiled by Tycho Brahe, conceiving the harmonious relations thus laid bare as the cause of the visible phenomena and likewise as the ultimately real and primary characteristics of things. Galileo was led by the thought of the motion of the earth and its mathematical treatment in astronomy to see if the motions of small parts of its crust might not be mathematically reducible, an attempt whose successful issue crowned him as the founder of a new science and led him in his efforts to see the fuller bearings of what he had accomplished to further metaphysical inferences. The scholastic substances and causes, in terms of which the fact of motion and its ultimate why had been accounted for teleologically, were swept away in favour of the notion that bodies are composed of indestructible atoms, equipped with none but mathematical qualities, and move in an infinite homogeneous space and time in terms of which the actual process of motion could be formulated mathematically. Intoxicated by his success and supported by the onrushing Pythagorean tide, Galileo conceived the whole physical universe as a world of extension, figure, motion, and weight; all other qualities which we suppose to exist in rerum natura really have no place there but are due to the confusion and deceitfulness of our senses. The real world is mathematical, and an appropriate positive conception of causality is presented; all immediate causality is lodged in quantitatively reducible motions of its atomic elements, hence only by mathematics can we arrive at true knowledge of that world. In so far, in fact, as we cannot attain mathematical knowledge it is better to confess our ignorance and proceed by tentative steps towards a fuller future science than to propound hasty speculations for grounded truths. In Descartes the early conviction that mathematics is the key to unlock the secrets of nature was powerfully strengthened by a mystic experience and directed by his pristine invention, that of analytical geometry. Could not the whole of nature be reduced to an exclusively geometrical system? On this hypothesis Descartes constructed the first modern mechanical cosmology. But what about the non-geometrical qualities? Some, those with which Galileo had been struggling, Descartes hid in the vagueness of the ether; others, encouraged by Galileo's example and led by his metaphysical propensities, he banished out of the realm of space and made into modes of thought, another substance totally different from extension and existing independently of it. 'When any one tells us that he sees colour in a body or feels pain in one of his limbs, this is exactly the same as if he said that he there saw or felt something, of the nature of which he was entirely ignorant, or that he did not know what he saw or felt.' But these totally different substances are in obvious and important relations. How is this to be accounted for? Descartes found himself quite unable to answer this overwhelming difficulty without speaking of the res cogitans as though it were after all confined to an exceedingly meagre location within the body. This pitiful position was definitely accorded the mind in |