Newton's Interests & Education
Interest in mechanical devices and inventions were a growing fashion, supported by a proliferation of technical manuals and other publications. An influential practical manual was John Bate’s Mysteries of Art and Nature (2nd ed., 1635), with its encyclopedic coverage of waterworks including waterwheels and pumps, automata, fireworks, and a variety of clever techniques for practical ends or amusing “experiments” (entertainments). It was widely popular and sold well.
Another popular publication (going through several editions) was John Wilkins’s Mathematical Magick: or, the Wonders; That may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry (1648). Its purpose was multiple — for leisure, for gentlemen with estates who might wish to understand mechanics, and for mechanical artificers themselves who might wish to learn principles and theory of their works. As Wilkins described its coverage,
“This whole Discourse I call Mathematical Magick, because the art of such mechanical inventions as are here chiefly insisted upon, hath been formerly so styled; and in allusion to vulgar opinion, which doth commonly attribute to all such strange operations unto the power of Magick; For which reason the Ancients did name this art Θαυματοποιητική, or Mirandorum effectrix [miraculous producer]. The first book is called Archimedes, because he was the chiefest in discovering Mechanical powers.”
After his time in Oxford as Warden of Wadham College, Wilkins became the Master of Trinity College, where Newton entered studies at Cambridge in 1661.
During his early studies at Cambridge, Newton made a notebook exploring the mechanical philosophy — his Quaestiones quaedam Philosophicae. He was reading the mechanist philosophers — including Descartes, Charleton, Gassendi, Galileo [Dialogue], Boyle, Hobbes, Digby, Glanville, More, and Streete (on Kepler). Thus he was well educated in current mathematics, although it was not the course of studies for his degree: self-taught, perhaps, but not without influences. Drawn to the mechanical explanations, but leery of their implicit metaphysics, Newton made 45 headings in the notebook on his readings and questions. The topics included
The nature of matter (atoms), place, time, motion
Cosmic order, including orbits and critique of Cartesian “vortices”
Tactile qualities
Violent motions, including critique of Aristotle
Occult qualities
Light, color, vision, sensations
Mechanical topics, with critique of Descartes’s extreme mechanism
Worries about atomism and lack of spirit/God in Descartes’s system
Deeply probing questions, and posing experiments to resolve them
His entry for “philosophy” is brief and to the point. Experiment was to be his guide.
“The nature of things is more securely & naturally deduced from their operacions one upon another than upon our senses. And when by the former Experiments we have found the nature of bodys, by the latter wee may more clearely find the nature of our senses. But so long as wee are ignorant of the nature of both soule & body wee cannot clearely distinguish how far an act of sensation proceeds from the soule & how far from the body &c.”
An example from his notebooks of his interests and explorations shows his device for ginding lenses (as he explored Descartes’s optics), along with the mathematics of conic sections. His notes on alchemy and religious topics, however, vastly outnumber in pages his work on mathematics and physics.: