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Document Details : Title: 'By Number, Weight and Measure' Subtitle: Wisdom 11:20, the History of Science and Isaac Newton Author(s): SNOBELEN, Stephen D. Journal: Lias Volume: 48 Issue: 2 Date: 2021 Pages: 195-308 DOI: 10.2143/LIAS.48.2.3291474 Abstract : At least four times from 1716 to 1724, travelling students from the Continent asked Isaac Newton to inscribe their autograph books. On those occasions, Newton chose as his epigram a line from Wisdom 11:20: ‘God has established all things by number, weight and measure’. Why did Newton choose this text from the Apocrypha as his motto? This essay seeks to provide a comprehensive answer to this question by placing Newton’s personal use of Wisdom 11:20 within the expanding concentric rings of his intellectual peers, early modern thought, and the long history of the use of the Sapiential Triad. With this evidentiary structure in place, this essay assesses how Newton’s deployment of Wisdom 11:20 is consistent with what we already knew of his thought, what this testimony might add to our understanding of his views on the relationship between God and natural philosophy, and why some of Newton’s contemporaries associated him with the passage. Along the way, there are encounters with creation theology, the design argument, Platonism, and the distinctions between voluntarism and intellectualism. Ultimately, this essay has three main goals: to highlight the important place of the Sapiential Triad in the history of science; to suggest why Newton deployed it; and to recover its use in early paeans to Newtonianism. |
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