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Inertia and Scientific Law in Sixteenth-Century Commentaries on Lucretius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

William L. Hine
William L. Hine*
Affiliation:
Atkinson College, York University
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Extract

When Newton was planning a second edition of the Principia, he considered adding to the work some passages indicating his belief that the theory of inertia was known in antiquity. He intended to include several selections, ninety verses in all, from Lucretius's De rerum natura to illustrate that point. In the end, however, he decided against incorporating the material in the new edition, probably because Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity College Cambridge, considered Epicurean thought, of which Lucretius's work is the chief example, to be an attack on religion. Bentley had written to Newton that he planned to base a refutation of Epicurean atheism on Newton's Principia and asked him for clarification of several points.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 728 - 741
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1995

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