Newton, Sir Isaac

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), was attached to Trinity College, Cambridge (1661–96); the rest of his life was spent in London as master of the mint and president of the Royal Society, being knighted in 1705. Modern scholarship has not seriously affected his stature in the fields of mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics, astronomy, optics, natural philosophy, or cosmology. We now appreciate more fully the extent of his dedication to theology, biblical chronology, prophecy, and alchemy. In these latter spheres, Newton relates to the Cambridge Platonists, especially More and Cudworth. Newtonianism was based on his three major works. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), the Opticks (1704), and Arithmetica Universalis (1707). It was the dominant philosophy of the Enlightenment, influencing all fields of science, and finding its way into the poetry of Pope, J. Thomson, and E. Young, but eventually producing a reaction from Goethe and Blake. F. Bacon and Newton were fused together to become the twin deity of English science in the 19th cent. under the banner ‘inductive philosophy’.