from Britain by his network fellows, building a theory of mind on Locke and
Newton.- I place “modern” in quotes to indicate that this is a historically relative usage. The
alliance among religious and political liberalism and science, and among their
opposites on the conservative side, was at its height in the Enlightenment and in
the 1800s. The alliance has been breaking down in our own times, beginning with
the existentialists and continuing through the postmodernists. - DSB (1981: 10:42–102); Westfall [1981]. Newton had early contacts with the main
mathematical network too. His teacher Barrow had been a Royalist, unlike the
Oxford scientists; ousted from his Cambridge fellowship in 1655, he toured the
Continent and met the leading mathematicians, likely including Fermat and Rober-
val. Although Barrow’s substantive influence may not have been great, Newton
was thereby made aware of the forefront of mathematical problems, and it was
upon this terrain that he made his youthful contributions in the mid-1660s to the
calculus and infinite series. Barrow recommended Newton as his successor when
he gave up the Lucasian professorship of mathematics in 1669 to take the profes-
sorship in divinity. This suggests the order of precedence at Cambridge at this time:
theology was regarded as more significant than science, and Newton shows the
same priorities in his own work before 1684. - Berkeley was very young compared to other philosophers at their height of crea-
tivity: 25 years old when he published his masterwork, Principles of Human
Knowledge. A similar case is Schelling, who burst on the philosophical scene in
Germany at the age of 20. In both cases there was early contact with a core
network, at a time when the structural situation was rapidly changing. For contrast
there are the aged Hobbes and Locke. Young or old, whoever gets onto the central
turf at those moments reaps the fame. - See Hume’s Letters (Greig, 1932: 23). Hume presents himself in the Introduction
of his Treatise as a follower of Locke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and the other Deists. In
a private letter in 1737, however, he points to Descartes, Malebranche, Bayle,
and Berkeley as keys to his Treatise, suggesting the wider intellectual sphere at
which he was aiming. This was just the time when Newton’s calculus of fluxions
was coming under attack for its glib assumptions about infinitesimals. In 1734
Berkeley joined the fray with an extended critique, following the points he had
raised against mathematics in his New Theory of Vision. Hume studied at Edin-
burgh with Newtonian mathematicians, probably including Colin Maclauren (122
in the key to Figure 10.1), who had extended Newton’s geometrical proofs and
gotten his chair at Newton’s recommendation, and who led the Newtonian re-
sponse to Berkeley in 1742 (Kitcher, 1984: 232–240; Jesseph, 1993). Hume picked
up the theme of Berkeley’s attack; in the beginning of his Treatise he devotes
considerable attention to arguing against the infinite divisibility of time and space
(i.e., against the Maclauren-Newton position) and in favor of indivisible points,
which must be matters of experience if they are to exist at all. He criticizes geometry
(Maclauren’s specialty) as a science of no great certainty, since it must proceed via
induction from the senses, and concludes that all knowledge, including that of
mathematics, is only probable (Hume, [1739–40] 1969: 74–75, 176).
1002 •^ Notes to Pages 609–615