philosophy as grounds for Deism; on the other side, a religious opposition
emerged which increasingly repudiated science. Since intellectual fame is made
by engaging in current controversies with current weapons, the most successful
of the new spiritualists came from the most active scientific networks and
turned the tools of the scientific philosophy against itself.
Newton was a key link in this process. Eventually the most famous of all
scientists, he nevertheless was something of an outsider. The Invisible College
had formed at Oxford in the 1650s, then moved to London; but Newton was
at Cambridge, where the leading intellectual circle was the Platonists, critics
of the mechanical philosophy. Newton got his intellectual start from contact
with the Platonist side. He was born near Grantham, Henry More’s home; he
was first taught mathematics by a pupil of More, and More was his country
neighbor as well as his university colleague. Newton’s philosophical position
was close to More’s metaphysics.^24 When Newton published his first paper in
1672, its theory of light was criticized by Hooke and Huygens as inferior to
their own theories. Newton largely withdrew from scientific work and spent
much of the next decades on anti-Trinitarian theology and research on biblical
prophecies, and in searching for a primordial philosophy which he believed
was held in common by the ancient Pythagoreans and Chaldeans and expressed
in a secret language used by the alchemists. Until 1684, when the astronomer
Halley encouraged Newton to develop and publish his mathematical science,
Newton was active largely as a philosopher in the occultist tradition mixed
with the theology of the Cambridge Platonists. His conflict with the main-
stream of materialist scientists continued the oppositions that we saw earlier
in Figure 10.1 between Fludd and Mersenne, or More and Cudworth against
Gassendi and Hobbes. Even after the triumph of Newton’s astronomy (1687)
and his optics (1704), there is an echo of Cudworth versus Descartes in the
debate between Newtonians against the French Cartesians over Newton’s
action-at-a-distance in the framework of empty space, where the materialists
visualized a world of continuous matter.
Although Newton became the icon of the scientific modernists, he origi-
nated outside the core of the mechanical philosophers, and his own network
of followers soon exploited the anti-modernist and even anti-science side of
the field. Among Newton’s followers was William Molyneux (105 in the key
to Figure 10.1), who founded the Dublin Philosophical Society in 1683 as an
affiliate of the Royal Society. Molyneux worked in astronomy and optics,
concerned especially with the principles of telescopes, and corresponded in the
1690s with Locke, raising issues in the sensory theory of ideas by consider-
ing a hypothetical blind man who later acquired sight. His son Samuel Moly-
neux (120) continued this work on optics at Trinity College, Dublin; he was
Berkeley’s friend during the period (1705–1709) when Berkeley was writing610 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths