The Motion of the Planets: Newton’s Effect on English Thought
David Layton looks at the influences on Isaac Newtown and analyses the deep effects of his monumental work on both domestic and continental intellectual currents.
“Great Newton's dead,Full-ripe his Fame;
Cease, Vulgar Grief to cloud our Song:
We thank the author of our Frame,
Who lent him to the world so long.”
The death of Isaac Newton in 1727 was an occasion of almost national mourning. His distinction as a scientist, and his unchallenged position as the “philosophic sun” of his age, inspired a profusion of memorial poems whose general sentiment is illustrated by the quotation above from Allan Ramsay’s “Ode.”
Paramount among Newton’s many achievements was his monumental Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687. The work was divided into three books and Newton himself summarized the contents in his Preface to the First Edition:
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