The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (49 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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Page 284
And yet the suspicion that the new science was not as amenable to the old religious values as the old science was must have occurred to him while he witnessed these marvels. For one thing the books he read, despite all their ostensible confidence in the harmony of science and faith, betrayed an uneasiness that all was not well. No one could quite put down the spectre of mechanism, of works in the world apart from God and independent of Him.
16
Mather seems to have learned most of what he knew about the mechanistic philosophy from its critics. He probably never read Descartes'
Principles of Philosophy
(1644) or
Le Monde
(posthumously published in 1644), though he quoted on several occasions from the
Discourse on Method
.
17
Descartes's theory of vortices and his rejection of the possibility of a void did not attract Mather's curiosity, nor did Cartesian physics draw extended comment from the natural theologians Mather read. A number of these critics noted that Newton's mathematical analysis had collapsed not only the theory of vortices but the entire Cartesian cosmology. Though he must have been gratified, Mather's interest was not really aroused by this news.
What distressed him about the Cartesian hypothesis was its implication that the universe was self-governing. That God had done far more than create matter and set it in motion and that He intervened in the ordinary course of nature were propositions Mather clung to whatever Descartes held.
18
Mather faced the challenge of Cartesianism most clearly in a work he never succeeded in publishing, the Biblia Americana, his enormous commentary on Scripture. Running to several thousand pages, the Biblia not only offers illustrations and explanations of the Scriptures, chapter by chapter, it also contains essays on various problems from philology to science, that Mather considered to bear on the Word. The problem of cause intrudes itself at several points in his commentary but nowhere more clearly than in his discussions of the creation, the deluge of Noah's time, and the miracles of Christ.
19
Not so much as a hint of dissatisfaction about the Mosaic account of creation ever appeared in Mather's writings. In the Biblia he did concede that the usual commentaries on Genesis have certain "Difficulties" and that scholars had recently enjoyed only uneven success in relieving some of the "hardships" placed
 
Page 285
on Moses' story. His own view made Moses out as an early New-tonian, a devotee of the corpuscularian philosophy; but unfortunately, until the discoveries made by the new science this prevision of modernity in the Scriptures had gone undetected. Cotton Mather owed this opinion to no man: it belonged uniquely to his fertile mind. But to translate the Mosaic creation into Newtonian language he turned for aid to Richard Bentley and William Whiston.
20
Bentley (1662-1742), who served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1700 until his death, had given the first set of Boyle Lectures in 1692 on the evidences of Christianity. Published the next year as
A Confutation of Atheism
, the lectures drew from the
Principia
a religious meaning that Newton himself shared. This was no accident, for Bentley consulted Newton while revising the lectures for the press, bringing their argument clearly into line with Newton's beliefs about the religious significance of the law of gravitation. Like Bentley, Whiston (1667-1752), who succeeded Newton in the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics in Cambridge, popularized Newton's science and defended the scriptural version of the nature of the world. But Whiston was not the scrupulous natural philosopher, content to suspend judgment about the physics of the Day of Judgment, and in 1696 he issued
A New Theory of the Earth
which described the beginning and the end of all things according to his own reading of the new science.
21
Both Bentley and Whiston were able teachers, and sometime late in the 1690's a fascinated Mather began to go to the school of their writings. Whiston, who like most of the Newtonians borrowed from Bentley, proved especially helpful in refuting what had come to be called in England the "Vulgar Hypothesis," the persistent folk belief that God had created the entire universe from nothing in six days and that the earth reigned at its center. This "Ptolemaic system of the world, must not have at this Time of Day to bee entertained with considerate men," Mather wrote in the Biblia.
22
But he could not dismiss it intact because he saw atheists using it to destroy the faith of the ignorant. The God of the vulgar system, he realized after reading Whiston, was a foolish God who took four days to model the eartha pin's point in the Universeand left Himself only two days to fashion the sun and stars in all their multiplicity. And
 
Page 286
this God seemed indifferent to His own laws of physics, especially the one governing gravitation. For if the Lord had created the heavens out of the same chaos that He had used in modeling the earth, there would be no way of explaining the remote distances of the sun and stars from the earth. One would have to postulate the existence of a law of "mutual Repulsion" instead of gravitation.
23
The few hours the Vulgar Hypothesis allows these bodies to separate from the earthly chaos in order to travel to their celestial orbits simply were not adequate to traverse their immense distances. AndMather observedbesides denying the universality of gravitation, the Vulgar Hypothesis in assuming "that the Heavenly Bodies proceeded originally from the
Terrestrial chaos
, and cast themselves off from it every way supposes the Earth to be the
Center
of the world."
24
Had the threat from the mechanists not existed, Mather probably would not have found it necessary to separate himself from the Vulgar Hypothesis. By attacking it he gained an opportunity to demonstrate his own attachment to the most fashionable English scientists who, not incidentally, preserved a large place for the Divine in the workings of the universe. The great figure among them was, of course, Isaac Newton. Mather may have read the
Optics
at some time in his life, though probably not the
Principia
. The mathematics of these works would have escaped him but not the inferences Newton drew from his system. These Mather learned of secondhand from Bentley and Whiston.
25
The essential implication of mechanism had not changed, he knew, from its original version by Epicurus (
c
. 341-270 B.C.), though the argument in the seventeenth century was sent forth in the finery of Cartesianism. The universeancient and modern mechanists heldhad its beginnings in the creation of matter by the Deity, but its shape in the heavens and the earth was the result of a series of fortuitous events. The prospect of this massive indifference to the creation and to human beings frightened all good men. Fortunately in the Newtonian system the best defense of a prudent and provident God stood waiting. The starting points of Mather's refutation of "meer blind material causes"
26
was Newton's warning delivered to Bentley against speaking of "gravity as essential & inherent to matter."
27
In the first version of his lectures given under the Boyle Trust in 1692, Bentley evi-
 
Page 287
dently nearly slipped into this manner of thought that Newton feared. But careful man that he was, he consulted Newton before sending his manuscript to the printer. Newton picked out the flaw at once and in a series of letters to his admirer devoutly pointed out that though gravitation accounted for much in the celestial system, the proposition that gravity was innate to matter implied that "one body may act on another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else," a doctrine of such "absurdity" that Newton professed to believe that no man competent in scientific matters could entertain it.
28
Newton added in a sentence Bentley did not useand which Mather never sawthat gravity must be "caused'' by an agent who acted in accordance with certain laws.
29
Whether this agent was material or immaterial Newton left to his readers. Bentley rendered faithfully all but this last comment. The omission of Newton's uncertainty about the final agent in the process was deliberate because Bentley was untroubled by such doubts.
Mather recognized the force of Bentley's comments and repeated them. The agency of chance in the formation of the planetary system seemed unconvincing on still other grounds. As Bentley pointed out, by the best calculationshis own, of coursebefore the modeling of the heavens and the earth from the Mosaic chaos, each particle of matter was surrounded by an enormous void. The thought that in these infinite spaces particles joined to form the planetary system defied comprehension. But the argument that clinched the case against fortuitous mechanism for Mather rested on the most certain formulation of Newton's physicsthe universality of gravitation. If gravitation was not the act of the divine Agent, but instead inherent in matter, what would prevent the tendency of the particles to carry them to the center of the universe where they would congeal into one huge spherical mass? Newton and Bentley discussed this problem and agreed that it provided an irresistible argument against Epicureanism. Newton, however, argued that the objection carried validity only if one assumed that the space through which matter was scattered was finite; if space were infinite, matter would not convene in one mass but in separate masses such as sun and stars. Blind materialism could not enter through this assumption of infinite space because, as Newton explained,
 
Page 288
chance could not account for the division of matter into the two sorts that composed "shining" bodies, the sun and stars, and opaque bodies, the earth and planets.
30
Mather did not raise the troublesome question of the possibility of an infinite universe; he never suspected that the universe might be anything but finite in any case. And Bentley did not disturb his certainty by passing out the subtleties of Newton's views. The possibility that matter would form a huge spherical mass at the center of the universe did not terrify him. It "must really happen," he concluded, were it not for a "Miraculous power," responsible for gravitation and for all things. What saved the world from mechanism was this power of God, a God who exerted a ''continuous influence" in the ordinary course of nature, sustaining the law of gravitation.
31
Mather put more weight on "continuous influence" in his discussions of gravitation than he did upon "miraculous power." Almost none of the mechanists denied the first operations of God in the creation; the real danger in their schemes lay in their belief that God removed Himself from the universe once He set the machine going. Happily Newton rescued philosophy from blind chance and natural religion from the remote God. Mather always remained grateful to Newton and lost few opportunities to link his great name to the doctrine of a God who intervened constantly to sustain the universeand, by implication, human affairs.
32
If the experimental philosophy of Newton Was to be co-opted to religion's purposes, it was all the more necessary to translate the natural phenomena presented in Scripture into experimental terms. Mather's account of the Mosaic creation in the Biblia represented one major effort, and he did not neglect other opportunities. The deluge of Noah's day offered one, baffling at first sight, but one which had to be fulfilled if the status of natural theology were to remain high.
Hypotheses about the flood had so increased by Mather's day that he noted on several occasions that their proponents threatened to fall into "Hypothesimania."
33
Throughout a long record of speculation on the subject, he managed to avoid this contagionbut not by much. He also never succeeded in making up his mind about whether the true explanation of the deluge had been given. A number of accounts failed to convince him because
 
Page 289
they depended completely upon second causes and thereby excluded the "Immediate Interposition" of God. Others relied so fully upon an immediate Providence that they ignored the facts of Moses' narrative and the disposition of God to use second causes in His own way. In simple terms, the problem of understanding the deluge for every commentator carne down to asking where did all the water come from. Or, as Thomas Burnet, an English divine who knew something of the new philosophy, said: "The excessive quantity of water is the great difficulty, and the removal of it afterwards."
34
Mather agreed with Burnet's formulation but he dismissed his answer as being nothing more than the old Abyssian philsophy, which had appeared almost two centuries earlier. Burnet's theory was actually no more far-fetched than mostit held that the crust of the earth was originally smooth and uniform and had neither sea nor mountains. Sometime after the creation this crust fell into the watery abyss inside the earth which then overflowed to produce the flood. Mather could not accept this account because it implied that the Mosaic creation left the world unfinished. There were other theorists more clearly affected by natural philosophy than Burnet and who agreed that the abyss had yielded its waters for the deluge. Over the years Mather pondered their writings: John Ray, William Sinclair, and Whiston; and Newton's comments also drew his attention. Until at least 1711, he conceded probability to Whiston's contention that the close approach of a comet had drawn the sea over the land, but he also admired Ray and Newton's theory that a shift in the earth's center of gravity decreed by God had sent the subterraneous waters pouring out, only to return when God restored the old center. Still another theory, Doctor Sinclair's held that divinely ordered earthquakes deep within the earth set up a train of physical causes which resulted in the flood. Sinclair, a professor of chemistry, had argued that the quakes released salty exhalations through cracks on the earth's surface which by interacting with the earth's atmosphere produced the heavy rains described in Scripture. At the same time, the shifts within the crust sent earth crashing upon the waters of the abyss, and the flood that sent Noah's ark on its voyage occurred. Sinclair had done more than speculate; as a solid empiricist he had performed experiments in his laboratory on which his the-

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