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One of the driving ideas behind many of the various movements in 17th-century natural philosophy was that of the unity of knowledge. There were two principal ways of establishing this in its most general form. The first was politico-theology: Spinoza undermined the claims of Christianity to supply satisfactory notions of wisdom and happiness, and to set out to develop a novel account of how a mechanised natural philosophy can lead to wisdom and happiness. The general unqualified rejection of the Spinozean model does not mean that in a struggle between legitimacy, which the Spinozean conception effectively abandoned, and autonomy, which it established beyond doubt, natural philosophers favoured legitimacy over autonomy. They wanted both, and the answer was deemed to lie in physico-theology: revelation and natural philosophy were treated as being mutually reinforcing, there being a process of triangulation towards the shared truth of revelation and natural philosophy.

There was always a lack of fit between natural philosophy and natural history in the Aristotelian tradition, and the latter was better adapted to the Christian idea of the universe as something created. The natural history tradition was marginalized with the introduction of Aristotelianism in the 13th century, but it continued to play a role in conceiving of nature as a text to be read in a similar way to that in which revelation was read. Developments in biblical and legal philology in the 16th century transformed the model on which natural history was based, and as a result, it ceased to be allegorical and became literal. By the 17th century, it had begun to provide a new kind of religious reading of nature.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was a concern to reconcile Christianity, the traditional humanistic disciplines, and natural philosophy. There are two principal ways in which the reconciliation between religion and natural philosophy was attempted: metaphysics and physico‐theology. The Leibniz/Clarke correspondence encapsulates many of the questions at issue.

This chapter focuses on Lord Kelvin's collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait. Probably the most influential legacy of their collaboration on ‘heavy mathematical work’ was the production in 1867 of The Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which became universally known as ‘T&T’. It was Tait's concern to have adequate textbooks for his students to support his lectures that led to the project that resulted in ‘T&T’.

David Hume was brought up as a Calvinist, and studied Newtonian physics and methodology at Edinburgh University and beyond. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Hume attacked the foundations of post-Newtonian natural theology by exploiting both Newton's rules for reasoning in natural philosophy (Regulae Philosophandi) and Protestant critiques of natural reason, in order to attack the metaphysical and theological foundations of 18th-century natural religion. It is argued that while Coleridge never ceased to attack the ‘infidelity’ and corruption of the atheist Hume, he could not easily dismiss Hume's arguments against natural religion, since they were often couched in the language of ‘epistemological piety’ as practiced by Christian philosophers like Boyle, Locke, and Newton. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Coleridge's acknowledged intellectual debts to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790).

The conclusion draws together several of the main themes of the book, arguing that political arithmetic can only be understood properly from the manuscripts he circulated in his lifetime, and in the context of his lifelong engagement with natural philosophy and his Baconian interpretation of the methods and purposes of science. Petty's project to transform government through the systematic manipulation of populations in the interests of the state undermines any retrospective distinction between his contribution to social science and his interest in social engineering; the concept of ‘biopolitics', though equally anachronistic, is more appropriate. By the same token, however, the massive expansion (in real terms) of demographic manipulation after Petty's death suggests that political arithmetic's ambitions were not abandoned but merely concealed.

It is commonly said in the early modern period that elusive qualities draw natural bodies together. This chapter offers a critical history of attempts to explain such preternatural forces in natural philosophy. It argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi appears as a key term in the vernacular debate about occult qualities and other secrets of nature, and that it becomes a site of lexical conflict between traditionalists (especially Jesuit natural philosophers) and so-called ‘new’ philosophers (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton). Its appearance in this context is best understood as a symptom of the crisis that besets scholastic natural philosophy in the 17th century. The je-ne-sais-quoi offers in this way a point of entry into central debates of the period known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Not only does the word help articulate philosophical discussions about preternatural phenomena, but those discussions also offer access to the nature of the je-ne-sais-quoi itself.

The chapter explores the development of the thought of John Locke. It begins with his early medical concerns, showing how these became connected with the issue of the standing of ‘experimental natural philosophy’. The most comprehensive statement of the philosophy to which Locke was opposed was that of Nicolas Malebranche, and Locke's mature views can be seen as a response to Malebranche. The reading offered brings to light an understanding of empiricism as a successor to, and philosophical refinement of, seventeenth‐century ‘experimental’ natural philosophy, something which is intimately tied up with natural‐philosophical practice, and is quite distinct from the speculative epistemology to which it is reduced in the ‘rationalism/empiricism’ debates.

Scientific values embodied in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the civic virtues embedded in his practical sciences (ethics and politics), were used to improve the quality of government in the 14th century by King Charles V of France. This was readily feasible because of the separation of church and state, the favorable attitude toward natural philosophy by medieval theologians, and the institutionalization of the study of Aristotle’s theoretical and practical sciences in the medieval universities, which relied heavily on reasoned argumentation and a rejection of arguments from authority, as exemplified by Nicole Oresme. The intellectual habits developed in this process shaped a “scientific temperament” that ushered in early modern science. In stark contrast, Islam was a theocracy with no separation of church and state. Natural philosophy was viewed as a potential threat to religious faith and was marginalized, leading eventually to a gradual deterioration in the study of the exact sciences, which had previously attained the highest level in the civilized world.

This chapter presents an impressionistic, and thus imprecise, sketch of the history of British geography from 1500 to 1900. Over these 400 years, British geography has assumed many different forms in many different arenas. Whether as a species of natural philosophy and mathematics, as a form of regional portraiture, as overseas lore, or expeditionary travel; whether in universities curricula or at royal courts, in school texts or learned societies; whether as a vehicle of national and local identity or as a channel of imperial desire: geography has been inextricably intertwined with the social, intellectual, political and religious history of the British Isles.

This chapter provides an introductory discussion of the nature and scope of early modern natural philosophy, including the distinction between Experimental and Speculative natural philosophy and the relation between natural philosophy and medicine. States the main theses of the book and provides an overview of the contents of each chapter.

This chapter discusses the impact of natural philosophy on views of angels, and the ways in which angels constituted thought experiments in natural philosophy. Milton's angels are objects of natural-philosophical knowledge. There was no divorce between mechanical and occult or spiritual philosophy; rather, it was the opponents of the Society, such as Hobbes, who doubted that spiritual beings were reliable evidence. Increasingly the ‘proof’ of the spirit world lay in descriptions and explanations of apparitions, such as those compiled by Robert Boyle, Glanvill, and More. The spirits concerned were predominantly demons because the age of miracles and angels was over. Still, there is no real division between the philosopher, theologian, and poet, because the story is ‘a complex narrative organism’ and the part and whole must be understood together.

This chapter concerns Hume's account in Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) of the operation of ‘general rules’. It considers their relation to conceptions of regularity, probability, circumstance, and experience that obtained in early modern logic and natural philosophy, taking occasion to reflect upon the significance of Hume's claim, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that natural philosophy and moral philosophy are ‘derived from the same principles’. It concludes by suggesting that a number of Hume's essays are structured as reflections and refinements upon commonly-held general rules.

The most important and exceptional element in Spinoza's scientific thought is simply that natural philosophy, or science, is of universal applicability and that there is no reserved area beyond it. This implied a stark contrast between Spinoza's scientific rationality and that of every other leading philosopher and scientist of the age, not least Descartes. Various contemporaries attested to Spinoza's skill in preparing lenses and building microscopes and telescopes. Among those most aware of Spinoza's work with microscopes was the preeminent scientist of the Dutch Golden Age, Christian Huygens. Below the surface, the barely suppressed rivalry between Huygens and Spinoza extended far beyond lenses and microscopes. For both men, the central issue in science at the time was to revise and refine Descartes' laws of motion and mechanics. Another central strand of Spinoza's scientific thought is his critique of Boyle. Spinoza relegated observation and experiment to the secondary role of confirming or contradicting hypotheses, and it was on this ground that he was drawn into criticizing Boyle and the empiricism of the Royal Society.

Platonism played a much more significant part in the development of the new natural philosophy in the seventeenth century than has generally been understood. This paper displays the crucial role that Platonist doctrines about mind, soul, God, and emanative causation played in the natural philosophy of two seventeenth-century philosophers: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Anne Finch Conway (1631–1679). The paper explores the failure of the metaphysical underpinnings of the mechanical philosophy, and displays the importance of early modern Platonism to right those metaphysical wrongs. The Platonism of Leibniz and Conway reveals a good deal both about the specific use of Platonist doctrines in grounding the new seventeenth-century natural philosophy and the precise motivations behind doing so.

This chapter examines Petty's early life and apprenticeship in England, education at a Jesuit collège in Normandy, and studies in philosophy and medicine in Utrecht, Leiden, Amsterdam and Paris during the early and mid‐1640s. It was during these years that Petty first came into contact with several important influences on his later work: among the Jesuits, pure and mixed (applied) mathematics; in the Low Countries, Cartesianism, Harveian mechanistic physiology, and iatrochemistry (alchemical medicine); in Paris, such natural philosophers as Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and, most importantly, Thomas Hobbes. While still just developing his own philosophical persona, Petty was exposed in these years to some of the main currents of the new natural philosophy, and some of the major participants in the Scientific Revolution.