The first 123 folios (246 ‘pages’) of BL Add MS 32546 present a unified work, albeit with elements composed separately and at different times, under the general heading ‘The Method Regulated’ (also called ‘The World’ , or ‘The Systeme of the World’). The immediate reference in the title, and the scope of the work, is to Descartes’ The World. Descartes had written this between 1629 and 1633 but it remained unpublished in his lifetime. In the immediate aftermath of the persecution of Galileo, Descartes had been anxious about the reception of his Copernican, materialist, ‘secular’ approach. Part of it was used in his Principia philosophiae of 1644, but the work in its entirety did not appear until 1677.
Roger North argues for a ‘world’, or universe, of bodies suspended in ‘aether’, a very fine-grained fluid that filled all the spaces between bodies making space into a plenum, a ‘fulness’, rather than a vacuum, or ’emptiness’. Movement in this world is driven by the flow of aether – he uses the analogy of straws floating in a whirlpool. North rejects explicitly the Newtonian system of bodies propelled by the attractive power of gravity in a vacuum. In Roger North’s and Descartes’ world planets and systems of planets do not have exact pathways, so measurement by infinitesimal mathematical calculation misses the point of understanding the fluid dynamics and the multiple connectedness of the whole. The work done by Newton and others in estimating the nature of ellipses, for example, was a commendably clever waste of time; for North, Newton was mathematician, not a natural philosopher. Newton’s system allows comets with huge elliptical orbits and regular periodicity; in the Cartesian system comets were very problematic and scarcely explained, their periodicity was denied. Elsewhere, when North comes to explain tides, he refutes Newton’s explanation which argued the attractive power of the moon, proposing a ‘common-sense’ materialist account where the moon presses on the aether which presses on the atmosphere which presses on the sea. He argues for an exactly opposite relation of moon to tide to Newton – for him the closeness of the moon reduces through pressure, rather than increases through gravitational pull, the swell of the tide. For North, like Descartes, centrifugal force threw heavy matter outwards within the swirling aether system until it reached its proper place. For North, Newton’s notions of centripetal force and gravitational attraction were dangerous, retrograde kinds of mysticism, a return to Aristotelian error. Like Descartes, North also employs the notion of aether to explain the inner workings of the human body. Their systems of the world explain not only cosmography, but also biology and the inner working of things. Aether is a very nearly immaterial material – a wonderfully baroque contradiction in terms. It is a material at the very margin of the spiritual. In the human body, aether links the ‘soul’ to the body through the nervous system and the brain, which are linked in the functioning of the pineal gland (he is rather less dogmatic than Descartes on this particular point). The thing to grasp here is that the world and everything in it functions systematically. If you understand the system you understand the functioning method of all complex entities – as North says at one point ‘I thinck it Impossible that any one Can understand, & Not beleev, all are of a kind, & that ye Same analogy of thing’s runns thro ye whole world’.
The Method Regulated is informed not only by Roger North’s Cartesian physics, but also by his resistance to and opposition to Isaac Newton’s mathematical cosmography. When the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared in 1687 it ended Cartesian physics as a serious scientific system. Following the publication of the second edition in 1713, which included in the General Scholium, an explicit rebuttal of Descartes’ physics (it is where Newton first used the famous phrase ‘Hypothese non-fingo’, ‘I frame no hypotheses’), North seems to have begun planning and constructing a focused Cartesian defence which, as we see in other materials on this website, led eventually to the composing of the Physica (BL Add MS 32544). North’s personal investment in the defence of Descartes was first stimulated in 1706, by the publication of Newton’s Optics. In responding to that, North had attacked Newton’s theory of light from a materialist position. In the plenum system, light was communicated by the pressure of light particles on the surrounding aether, like sound through air, one thing bumps into another. The only rules required were Descartes’ Laws of Motion (which Newton had adapted in his own system, of course). North was outraged, on Descartes’ behalf, that Newton had not only refuted him, but that he had done so by absorbing him. There are many more points of difference which will become clear to anyone reading these essays – Newton’s belief in absolutes of time and space, for example, are argued by North to be evidence of him ignoring the very logic of those Laws of Motion which he had assimilated. Further to this, but perhaps as significant as any of these ‘scientific’ issues, Newton was protected by and supported by Roger Norths’ political enemies, and held radical and ‘atheistic’ (or ‘deistic’ …) religious views.
CONTENTS
f. 1r Method Regulated. [Description of] 1st part
f. 2v [of] 2nd Part
f. 3r [of] 3rd Part
f. 3v [of] 4th and 5th Parts
f. 4r Method Regulated, Book 1, [contents]
f. 4v 1. of perception
f. 7r 2. Body
f. 11r 3. Body in Chang [or Motion]
f. 14r Time
f. 16v Abstracts
f. 19r The world
f. 25v [Introduction to Systeme of the World]
f. 27r Systeme of ye World
f. 33r The World
f. 91r Gravitation
f. 112r Fire
f. 120r Explosion
f. 124r To Mr. … [Of the Aurora Borealis, March 6, 1716; & Index, f. 133v]
f. 134r To Mr. … [Of the Aurora Borealis, March 6, 1716]
f. 142r [Of the Aurora Borealis, March 6, 1716]
f. 142v [Part of a will, Roger North]
f. 143r Of light & Colours
f. 169r. [Incomplete letter]
f. 170r Inceptio
f. 174r Of Newton [on Principio]
f. 179r Mr. Keil of Oxford
f. 180r Some Notes of Mr Newtons singular Insinuations
f. 181r Some hints of light & Colours
f. 184r Notes on Reading Mr Newtons Opticks
f. 189r [On Newton, centrifugal/pedal force, gravity, etc.]
f. 191r Praefaces, Science
f. 192r Science
f. 195r A short Idea of sensation
f. 197r Of Attention, and the great Importance of it In ye work of Sence
f. 199r A further prosecution of the partitions of sence, and of Capacity
f. 201r Effects of Motion [and Mixt Events]
f. 207r Authoritys
f. 231r Indefinites
f. 247r [Prjudice]
f. 263r Time
f. 266r [fragment of an essay on prejudice]
f. 271r Cartes
f. 273r A Body centered on a pin
f. 274r [Light]
f. 275r [fragment of an essay on Light]
f. 277r [fragment of an essay on Indefinites]
f. 278r Mr. Keil
f. 278v [Problem in Reflection]
f. 279r Audibles
f. 279v Attention
f. 280r 24 Novr. 1706. Answ. to a letter of Mr. Clerck [i.e., Samuel Clark]
f. 281r [A problem on an inclined plane]
f. 282r [On vortexes]
f. 283r [fragment on the mind’s comprehension ]
f. 284r [fragment on the working of muscles]
f. 284v [Part of Montague North’s Sacrament Certificate, January 1731]
f. 285r [Part of Montague North’s Sacrament Certificate, January 1731]
f. 285v [A problem in turning and resistance]
f. 286v [Part of Montague North’s Sacrament Certificate, January 1731]
f. 287r [fragment on mathematical exactness]
f. 288r [fragment on resistance]
f. 288v [a legal document with a fragment on music and sound]
f. 290r [fragment on natural philosophy]
f. 290v [another version of f. 290r]
f. 291r [on proofs of the Deity]
f. 292r Matter Indifferent to Move or Rest, & ye use &c.
f. 293r Actuall Infinity
f. 294r Extent Magnitude Devision Figure [fragment]
f. 298r Instances of Confused perceptions
f. 298v The Caus of Indistinction of Images
f. 299r The Nicety of Sence
f. 299v Objects distinct or Confused
f. 300r philosofy=&=fers [i.e., philosophy and philosophers]
f. 301r Upon a cursory perusall of the Easy Method Etc, I observe
f. 303r [Headings for an essay on the spring of air, and index of the papers of Francis North]
f. 304r [Receipt for Joseph Bernard Coachmakers, July 1707, and cross-sections of St Paul’s Cathedral]
f. 306r [Indices for Life of Francis North]
f. 308r Index Emendatrix [for an essay on Newton]
f. 309r Ayre