together everything in his possession related to Newton but had done nothing about it. This would not have been a difficult task, because all Nicholas Wickins could pass on to Smith were three short letters transcribed into a notebook, five other notes concerning mundane financial matters, and the anecdote describing their first meeting.
Fortunately, much more is known of Newton’s academic life as an undergraduate. As at other great seats of learning throughout Europe, the curriculum at Cambridge was based almost exclusively upon the teachings of the Greek masters – especially the ideas of Aristotle, with which Newton would already have been familiar from his reading at the Clarks’. Throughout his first year he attended his lectures conscientiously, but he was already beginning to question the validity of classical ideas.
Like many of the more conscientious students, he had been following the latest philosophical developments and was reading ‘fashionable’ philosophers, such as Descartes and Galileo, whose works were gradually becoming available in England. As a result, sometime in early 1663, Newton underwent a radical change of approach. During a lecture, while making meticulous notes on Aristotle’s teachings, mid-page he stopped abruptly. Then, after leaving dozens of pages blank, he wrote at the top of a fresh page, ‘Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae’ – ‘Some Problems in Philosophy’. Beneath this he wrote, ‘Amicus Plato, amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas’ – ‘I am a friend of Plato, I am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.’15
This collection of ‘Quaestiones’ – or the Philosophical Notebook, as it is sometimes called – marks the point at which Newton stepped away from tradition and began to question what he was taught. He began by creating forty-five headings in the notebook – topics concerning the nature of the universe which he would attempt to investigate and answer. These included ‘Of Water and Salt’, ‘Attraction Magnetical’, ‘Of the Sun Stars & Planets & Comets’ and ‘Of Gravity & Levity’. In some cases nothing has been written under the heading, but elsewhere there is a paragraph or two of neatly written text, while some headings are followed by lengthy discourses.
Like his schoolboy exercise books, these undergraduate notebooks contain questions and attempts at answers taken from the works of well-known natural philosophers. In many places the arguments are then dissected and questioned further. Sometimes a section of text is followed by a piece composed by Newton in which he seems to be addressing the quoted author and asking him questions directly or drawing attention to things that do not appear clear. In this way, Descartes and Boyle come under scrutiny along with the antiquated philosophies of Aristotle.
An example is a piece under the heading ‘Of Water and Salt’ which involves an early hypothesis to explain the ebb and flow of the sea, later explained by Newton in Proposition XXIV of Book II of the Principia, first published some twenty-four years later:
To discover whether the Moon pressing the atmosphere causes the flux of the sea, take a tube of about 30 inches filled with quicksilver or else take a tube with water which is so much longer than 30 inches as the quicksilver is weightier than water & the top being stopped the liquor will sink 3 or 4 inches below it leaving a vacuum (perhaps). Then, as the air is more or less pressed without by the Moon so will the water rise or fall as it does in a weatherglass by heat or cold.16
At this stage of his career Newton could offer no explanation for this, but he analyses it in terms of what others say. Can the movement of the quicksilver be explained by the theories of Aristotle, who would declare that the substance is merely trying to find its place in the world? Or is Descartes closer to the truth: is the rise and fall of the surface of the quicksilver due to the movement of particles and ether bearing down upon it, creating vortices within the liquid?
Elsewhere there are speculations based upon thought experiments. Under the heading ‘Of Gravity & Levity’ Newton wrote:
Try to discover whether the weight of a body may be altered by heat or cold, by dilatation or condensation, beating, powdering, transferring to several places or several heights, or placing a hot or heavy body over it or under it or by magnetism, whether lead or its dust spread abroad, whether a plate flat-ways or edgeways is heaviest.17
Although these inquiries seem to us to have obvious answers (why, for example, should an object weigh different amounts if it is laid flat or edgeways?), no one before Newton had recorded their efforts to verify these things. Rather than accepting tradition, Newton wanted to clarify such matters for himself.
He acquired some of these notions from books available in the extensive library at Trinity College, which contained works by the great natural philosophers of the day. Here could be found texts by Descartes, Boyle, Thomas More, Hobbes, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo (with the exception of Galileo’s two most important works, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, both of which appear to have been too risqué for the conservative thinkers who authorised the purchase of books for the library). The problem for Newton was not the range of material to be found in Cambridge university libraries: it was that students could use the libraries only at special times, and then only when supervised by a tutor. From what we know of Newton’s tutor, Pulleyn, who was usually unavailable and quite uninterested in natural philosophy, it would seem most likely that Newton gained access to these all-important works through the agency of another fellow, almost certainly Humphrey Babington.
Although at first inspired and influenced by Descartes, Newton quickly rejected the Frenchman’s mechanical theory as a concept that denied the omnipotence of the Creator. He was able to accept Pierre Gassendi’s Christianised atomism, but even this was with reservations. In the ‘Quaestiones’ he wrote:
Of Atoms
It remains therefore that the first matter must be atoms and that matter may be so small as to be indiscernible. The excellent Dr More [the Cambridge fellow Henry More] in his book of the soul’s immortality has proved this beyond all controversy, yet I shall use one argument to show that it cannot be divisible in infinitum & that is this: Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.18
Newton is here using logic to dispel the possibility of anyone taking the atomic theory too far. Matter being a finite thing, it cannot, he reasoned, be divided forever into infinitesimally small parts. (If Newton sounds overconfident here and seems to be treating the issue with the same overzealousness that Aristotle might have employed, we can perhaps put it down to his relative youth. These were, after all, musings in a private notebook.)
The key influence in guiding Newton towards a view of the universe that maintained a supreme role for the Creator was the Cambridge philosopher Henry More, a man who was interested in all areas of natural philosophy and mysticism and a leading member of the group of fellows known as the Cambridge Platonists.
Born a gentleman, More had gained the finest education at Eton and was elected a fellow of Christ’s College in 1639. Believing in the pursuit of knowledge as a means of exalting God, and upholding the Scholastics’ edict ‘Understand so that you may believe, believe so that you may understand’, More declined all offers of ecclesiastical positions and even the mastership of Christ’s College in order to lead an academic life unhindered by other responsibilities.
He and the other Cambridge Platonists believed that the world was permeated by spirit, which More termed the ‘Spirit of Nature’. This esoteric ‘force’, he believed, mediated between God – who controlled all actions, all purpose and all outcomes – and a purely mechanical universe –
