5 - The Impact of Newton

Summary

Isaac Newton was and remains beyond doubt an iconic figure of English intellectual culture from the late seventeenth century onward. It is widely accepted that (1) Newton's mathematically based natural philosophy supplied the conceptual apparatus for a decisive and far-reaching breakthrough in the extent to which the natural, physical world could be understood, and ultimately manipulated and controlled; and (2) this crucial set of changes had an indelible effect on many if not all aspects of the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century in England and further afield. Surely we must be obliged, then, to treat a pair of thinkers and writers such as William Stukeley and David Hartley, strongly Newtonian in terms of direct influence and orientation, as occupying fundamentally different territory from that of the essentially pre-Newtonian Sterry and Roach.

Yet part of the premise of this study is that shared underlying conceptions of music helped to maintain a level of continuity that links the thought of all four of my main subjects. Furthermore, it will be suggested that the values implicit in this continuum were in some significant way antipathetic or resistant to the forces of Newtonianism as they have often been portrayed. We can recognise this not only in Peter Sterry's unfailing spiritual-aesthetic connection with the music of the divine nature, and in Richard Roach's more idiosyncratic version of ‘natural music’, but in some of the fundamental beliefs exhibited by our Newtonian thinkers too. We begin to realise that even the ‘Newtonians’ Stukeley and Hartley occupy a position of some ambivalence in relation to the culture to which they supposedly belong: hovering somewhere between the rational and the mystical, strongly motivated by Newton's insights while subscribing to a deeply felt spirituality.

Or we can think of Stukeley and Hartley simply as maintaining the continuity of their connection with the world of our earlier thinkers. Of course, it took time for Newton to emerge as the central figure of a new culture. There is no reason to suppose that Sterry ever heard of him, though it is just conceivable that he may have done so via his former Cambridge connections.