BL Add MS 32544 is written in the hand of Montagu North. There are numerous comments in soft graphite pencil, which appear to be in the hand of his father, Roger North, the author. If it is indeed ‘corrected’ by Roger, then we have a terminus ante quem of 1734, the year of his death. There is internal evidence (see notes on ff. 7v and 191v) that gives us a terminus post quem of 1726. The date of the MS is between 1726 and 1734.
Although it is apparently final, the text is nonetheless incomplete. There are several gaps, and a number of empty pages. There are no diagrams, but there are a number of detailed analyses of absent diagrams, with spaces left for them. If you have been reading through these volumes in date order you might be disappointed that it is not as polemical (or say, ‘as witty’, or ‘as caustic’) as some earlier versions of similar arguments. Either Montagu’s, or Roger’s sense of decorum, or apprehension of what would better suit the arguments’ case in the public sphere, has made this a more moderate expression of ideas. But the general logic of the total system (as laid out in BL Add MS 32546, fol. 1r. ff., ‘The Method Regulated’) is recognizable. The Physica is one of a number of ‘finished’ (if incomplete) Roger North MSS to be found in the BL and elsewhere, although it was not published by Montagu after Roger’s death, as were the biographies of Francis, Dudley and John North, and the Examen. We can assume as we read it that this volume was intended for the press. The Physica is Roger North’s final word on Natural Philosophy.
Roger North is difficult to place, he is always rethinking, rewriting and revising. This text is in a different ‘difficult to place’ place from those he had occupied at different moments over the previous quarter century of thinking, writing and revising. But one thing remains constant, his fiercely partisan (you could say bigoted) attack on ‘party’, which for him over the entire period, was the ‘party’ of Newton. His hostility to Newton is found in every part of the book. The argument is carried on at every level. He argues that the mathematical account of Physics in the Principia and the Opticks is too exact and that, although undeniably ingenious, it is improbably ideal. He argues for a much less exact (and materially haphazard) Nature. He also accuses Newton of returning to the scholastic folly of hypostasizing concepts and anthropomorphizing matter. North’s account of Newton’s gravitational attraction suggests that Newton was attributing a will to combine (‘conatus‘) to senseless matter. He is also critical of Newton’s proposition of absolute motion, arguing instead for an infinite complexity of relative motions. He expresses bemused puzzlement at Newton’s attribution of materiality to light. Roger North dismisses Newton’s entire cosmography of mutually attractive matter in the vacuum of absolute space, along with the mathematical method that not only describes it, but that requires it.
As well as engaging critically with ‘the dominant model’ of Natural Philosophy, North was also putting together a positive account of his own. He begins with the experience of the individual human subject: “In life ye first notion is of self existence, wch (as I take it) Cartesius means by cogitation. But this seems not intuitive, as Angells may be supposed to know themselves; but from an attachment to materiallity; whereof ye perpetual changes prove to be ye objects of our continuall perception from ye first to ye last moment
of life.” From the start there is a drama of the conflicted nature not only of being human (mind/matter) but also the conflict of knowledge and experience. The outside universe, accepted as a common sense ‘given’, is beyond any complete knowledge; it has to be taken on faith and faith is to be tested by experience (in effect, judged by reason or cogitated upon); if we add only that it has also to be taken with Faith, then we have the whole ground of his Natural Philosophy.
Roger North’s experience, his ‘continuall perception’, suggests to him a messy and crowded world which, as we shall see, presses in. Consciousness, or continuity in self-awareness, is located in memory, and is only available to reasoning creatures. This state of being is manifest as ‘self existence’ (i.e., being present to the self); all dogs have it though to a lesser degree than people, and some people have it in a greater degree than others. Those that have it to the greatest degree are Natural Philosophers. The self-existent being perceives material change, or motion, simultaneously becoming aware of themselves as subjects, and of the world outside as object. By means of reasoning experiment (through the senses) and the bank of past experience (held in memory), we come to understand a world of objects, distance and time. Change is only motion, and everything is in motion with regard to everything else. The world of objects is full. The world of objects extends to encompass objects nearly as large as the whole (virtually infinitely large) World, and to objects as small as the particles of (virtually infinitely small) ‘aether’. Everywhere is occupied by something, everything is somewhere, there is no emptiness. Our senses might fail to perceive the content of apparently empty space, but reason suggests that everything must be something, and that even the smallest thing is swimming in something else. The interstices of things are always full of even smaller things. Motion is described according to simple rules of contact, as if all things were ‘in fluido‘, as if the universe were a giant flow. This is Roger North’s full world, or ‘plenum‘. Our sense organs are pressed upon by this fullness. Light is the vibration of a source carried through a medium to our sense organ. The sense organ produces the effect of the recognition of light, or sound, or taste, or whatever. This all sits very comfortably within a recognizable Copernican cosmography although (for important technical reasons to do with the aetherial theory of planetary motion) North’s planetary motion is not quite Keplerian. Time, of course, is just the recognition of motion having happened. When we are unconscious we are unaware of time. Things do not actually exist as they appear to be, things are more complicated – to submit to mere appearances is to be like a fool who thinks that pain is the property of the whip.
North’s Natural Philosophy accounts for everything it sees, although with a challenging amount of counter-intuition. Having been shown the basic system, we are led forward to receive answers, or reasoned ‘cogitation’, on some old riddles and questions. What is thunder and lightning? How, in the full world, should we understand the phenomenon of the tide? Where does water come from? His reasoning and interpretation is rarely far from the current wisdom of his contemporaries (look up thunder and lightning, or aurora borealis, or the origins of water, etc. in the Transactions of The Royal Society; he is not notably dafter than any of his contemporaries). What will please the modern reader is the way that these elucidations of commonplace ‘riddles’ are fitted into the elegant structure of the whole project. He starts (as a good post-Cartesian should) with the limitations of the knowing subject, and he proceeds (as a subject of the Age of Reason should) to doubt all, to seek to understand all, and to found that understanding upon clear and distinct ideas of what is knowable and what is not. Roger North is no less Cartesian than he had been in earlier drafts, his system declares that, but at the level of the individual statement he is much more sceptical of his erstwhile master. He is frequently critical of Descartes’ scientific conclusions. This can be interpreted as a symptom of Roger North’s growing independence, or perhaps (rather) a symptom of his desire to prove to an imagined readership his independence from any ‘party’ . His principle is that he stands above ‘party’ – which no modern reader can believe. We instantly recognise the ideological signatures of Cartesian Method, Baconian scientism, and … hereditary right. A similar reasoning shapes the historical method of the Examen where we are encouraged to believe that every position but that of Charles II and his ministers (that is, his good ministers) was an interested one.
The last section takes up some ‘mathematical mysterys’. Here North plays with the contradictions of mathematics. In themselves these mysteries go nowhere – other than offering a mathematical encounter with (for example) the notion of infinity. But they can be read back onto the earlier more critical encounter with mathematics which gave a methodological continuity to the critique of Newton. Mathematics, one might conclude, and it is likely implied, is brilliant, dazzling, but quite separate from the world of the experience of materiality, it is merely sophistry.
CONTENTS
1r Discourses Introductory
9r Of Natural Principle
12v Of motion what & how.
21r Of Plenitude & Vacuity
24r Of Time.
28r Of Force.
29v [4 blank pages]
30r Rules of impulses. (40 in all)
73v Extent of our Facultys
80r Of Motion in fluido
94v The Stellary world.
113v Of ye Air & Hemisphear.
130r Common Cosmography.
144v Of Fire.
160v Of light & Colours
189v Of Sound, ye Manner & ye Effect
200r Of ye Marine tydes
211r Of Meteors.
210v Of the Barometer.
229v [12 blank pages]
230r Of Thunder & Lightning
245r Of Water Springs & fountains.
252r Of spirituality
259r Of The Almighty.
267r Some Mathematical Mysterys