At the end of his widely quoted Query 31 of the Opticks, Isaac Newton expresses his hope that if, by following the method of analysis and synthesis, natural philosophy is perfected, then ‘the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged’. According to Newton, this enlargement should proceed through the perfection of natural philosophy, which consists in its increasing contribution to our knowledge of the attributes and intentions of God: ‘For so far as we can know by natural philosophy what is the first cause, what power he has over us, and what benefits we receive from him, so far our duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the light of nature’ (Newton 2004, p. 140). Therefore, natural philosophy is not an exclusively explanatory enterprise, but at the same time a natural theology,1 and as such it has intrinsic moral content—it reveals normative constraints imposed on human beings by their creator. From this perspective, studying nature is an enterprise continuous with studying scripture, and therefore, as Newton writes in the General Scholium, ‘to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy’ (Newton 2004, p. 92).
...MoreBook Zvi Biener (2014) Newton and Empiricism.
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