Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Editio secunda auctior et emendatior.
Cantabrigiae [Cambridge: Cornelius Crownfield at the University Press], 1713. Second edition, and the first to contain the General Scholium — Newton's most famous and most quoted single passage, in which the phrase Hypotheses non fingo appears in print for the first time. Twenty-six years separate this edition from the 1687 first, and Newton spent most of those years claiming to have lost interest in natural philosophy while in fact reworking the Principia in private. What the Cambridge mathematician Roger Cotes and the formidable Master of Trinity Richard Bentley between them extracted from him in the years 1709 to 1713 is not a corrected reprint of the 1687 Principia but a substantively different book — the version of the Principia through which the eighteenth century actually came to know Newtonian physics. The first edition had been a hurried mathematical performance for a tiny audience, printed in perhaps 250 copies and effectively unobtainable on the Continent within a few years. The second edition, printed in 750 copies at the recently revived Cambridge University Press and distributed by Newton's own hand to a list of European academies, princes and savants — including a personal presentation to Queen Anne on 27 July 1713 and copies sent to Cassini, de la Hire, Varignon, the Bernoullis, Leibniz and Yale — is the Principia through which Newtonianism established itself as the dominant scientific worldview of the European Enlightenment. The story of how the edition came into being is essentially the story of Cotes's labour. Bentley, who had recently revived Cambridge University Press and was looking for a flagship publication to establish its prestige, persuaded Newton in 1709 to allow a new edition and proposed Cotes — at twenty-seven, the recently appointed first Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity — as supervisor of the work. Newton at first treated the revision casually, but Cotes took it seriously, and in the course of three and a half years of close collaboration coaxed Newton into a similar enthusiasm. The surviving Newton-Cotes correspondence, edited by Edleston in 1850 and one of the most revealing documents we have of Newton at work, shows Cotes querying every page, proposing alterations, and gradually pulling Newton back into active engagement with mathematical and astronomical problems he had not seriously thought about in fifteen years. By the time the printing was finished, in the spring of 1713, the 494 pages of the 1687 had become a book of which, as Rouse Ball calculated, 397 are more or less modified in the second edition. The major reworked sections were the propositions on the resistance of fluids in Book II — sections 6 and 7, propositions 34 to 40, where Newton had been embarrassed by errors since the 1690s and which are now essentially rewritten; the lunar theory in Book III, much enlarged using observational data Newton had wrenched from Flamsteed in a quarrel that broke their friendship; the precession of the equinoxes (Book III, prop. 39); and the cometary theory (Book III, props. 41 and 42), of which the visible monument in the volume is the folding engraved plate at p. 465 showing the parabolic orbit of the great comet of 1680. None of this revised material had been seen in print before. Cotes died of a fever on 5 June 1716, three years after publication, aged thirty-three. When Newton heard, he is recorded as saying that if Cotes had lived we might have known something — the only generous tribute Newton ever paid to anyone, and a measure of how seriously the Principia of 1713 should be understood as a Newton-Cotes joint production rather than as a Newton solo. Cotes's Editoris Praefatio, which opens the book after Newton's two prefaces, is the first explicit, sustained, public defence of Newtonian natural philosophy as a method — induction from phenomena rather than hypothesis from first principles — and as a metaphysical position distinct from both Cartesianism and from Leibniz's emerging dynamical cosmology. Cotes attacks the Cartesian vortex theory of planetary motion directly and dismisses the charge that Newtonian gravitation is a causa occulta, an occult quality smuggled in by an author who has no proper mechanical explanation for the action of bodies at a distance. He insists that gravity is to be regarded as a primary property of matter on a level with extension, mobility and impenetrability. Newton, who had explicitly told Bentley not to attribute that view to him, declined to read the preface before publication and afterwards declined to disown it; his silence is itself eloquent, and he was content for Cotes's harder line to stand as the official Newtonian position. I. B. Cohen, in his Introduction to Newton's Principia (1971), called Cotes's preface the first clear public statement of the inductive method in any language. It is, more than any text Newton himself ever wrote, the founding manifesto of what the eighteenth century would call Newtonianism — and the Principia of 1713, as a result, is the first edition in which Newtonianism has the shape of a party, with a platform. By far the most important single addition to the second edition, however, is Newton's own — the Scholium Generale, sent by him to Cotes on 2 March 1713, very late in the printing process, and now the most quoted single passage in all of Newton's published work. It runs from page 481 to page 484, occupies the last leaves before the index, and was clearly conceived by Newton as the philosophical and theological capstone of the entire Principia. The Scholium begins with a sustained attack on the Cartesian hypothesis of vortices — the same target Cotes has already softened in his preface — and then expands into the most extended discussion of the nature of God ever printed under Newton's name. The phrasing is famously austere: God is to be understood not through the familiar attributes of perfection, which we may admire, but through dominion, in virtue of which we revere and adore him; he exercises this dominion in modo minime humano, in modo nobis prorsus incognito, and is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched. There is no room in this theology for anything resembling the personal God of orthodox Christianity. Newton scholarship is now broadly agreed that the surface text is constructed in concentric layers, with the uncontroversial argument from design occupying the outer skin and a heterodox attack on the doctrine of the Trinity concealed in the inner layers, accessible only to readers prepared to follow Newton's deeply private theology. Denial of the Trinity remained a criminal offence in Britain until 1813, a full century after the Scholium first appeared in print; Samuel Clarke, Newton's closest theological ally, had published a controversial critique of the Trinity the year before. The most revolutionary book in the history of science, championed throughout the eighteenth century as the model of orthodox natural theology, ends on a quietly subversive note that Newton was content for only the cognoscenti to recognise. From God, Newton turns abruptly to gravity, and to the most quoted sentence in his entire published work. He acknowledges that he has not been able to discover from phenomena the cause of gravity, and that he will not feign hypotheses about it: Hypotheses non fingo. The phrase has no published precedent. It does not occur in the 1687 Principia, nor in the Opticks, nor in any of Newton's earlier papers. Its first appearance in print is in this edition, on a leaf added in the spring of 1713 almost as an afterthought, and it has been the watchword of the Newtonian style of physics ever since — invoked by every subsequent generation of physicists who have wished to claim the authority of phenomena over speculation, from the eighteenth-century anti-Cartesians through Mach and Duhem to the operationalists of the twentieth century. Whether Newton himself meant it as the categorical rejection of all hypothesising that it became is doubtful; the surrounding paragraphs make clear that he is rejecting a particular kind of speculative mechanical hypothesis about the cause of gravity rather than abjuring theoretical reasoning in general. But the slogan, once printed, took on a life entirely independent of its author's intentions, and the 1713 Principia is the only edition in which one can encounter that life beginning. The Scholium ends with a paragraph that has attracted, if anything, less notice than it deserves. Having declared that he frames no hypotheses about the cause of gravity, Newton allows himself, in the last paragraph of the entire Principia, to speak of spiritus quidam subtilissimus — a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies, by means of which, he proposes, particles of bodies attract one another, light is emitted, reflected, refracted and bent, bodies are heated, sensations are excited, the limbs of animals move at the command of the will, and electric bodies repel and attract. It is an extraordinary list and an extraordinary moment: Newton, having spent the entire book establishing that gravity is a mathematical law without a known cause, ends his most public work by gesturing toward a unified mediating substance that would account at once for gravity, light, heat, sensation, the action of will and the phenomena of electricity. He concludes by remarking only that these are things which cannot be explained in few words — and the Principia ends. The spiritus subtilissimus paragraph is the closest Newton ever came in print to a unified theory of the imponderables, and it is the seed from which both the eighteenth-century aether physics of Hauksbee, Desaguliers and Boscovich and, through a longer historical filiation that runs through Faraday, the nineteenth-century field-theoretic conception of physics would germinate. It survives only because Newton appended it to the General Scholium in March 1713 and Cotes set it in type before the press could be stopped — a textual moment, in other words, made possible only by this edition. The remaining innovations of the second edition are smaller but worth recording. The dedication leaf is rewritten from 1687 — the Illustrissimae Societati Regali dedication that the present copy carries names King Charles II as the founder of the Royal Society and Queen Anne as the monarch under whose auspices it now flourishes, in place of the original 1687 dedication that had named James II. The change is small and politically inevitable (the Glorious Revolution had intervened, James was an exile, Newton himself had been knighted by Anne in 1705) but it is a reminder that this is the Principia of an established and triumphant national science rather than of a private mathematician operating at the edge of an institutional culture. Halley's celebrated Latin ode In viri praestantissimi D. Isaaci Newtoni opus hocce mathematico-physicum — the only verse tribute one major scientist has ever paid to the published work of another in seventeenth-century English science — is reprinted, with its closing line Nec fas est propius mortali attingere Divos still in place. Newton's two prefaces, the 1686 original and a brief new one dated Dabam Londini, Mart. 28. 1713 in which he summarises the changes, sit together for the first time. And — a small but real piece of editorial archaeology — the 1713 is the first edition of the Principia to carry an actual table of contents, the Index Capitum totius Operis, listing the section headings of Books I and II with their page references, together with a sketchy alphabetical index at the rear. The 1687 had had nothing of the sort. The book is, for the first time, navigable. This too is a sign of Cotes's editorial mind. The 1713 lunar theory deserves a closer look as the most contentious revision of the entire edition. Newton's reworking of Book III, propositions 25 to 35, on the motion of the moon, depended throughout on the unpublished observational data of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. Newton had had the use of Flamsteed's observations during the 1690s, but the relationship had broken down spectacularly when Flamsteed declined to release further data without prior credit, and Newton, with Halley's complicity, contrived to have Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis printed against his will in 1712 from a working draft. Flamsteed eventually recovered three hundred copies of the pirated edition and burned them publicly at the Royal Observatory; the corrected, authorised Historia would not appear until 1725, six years after Flamsteed's death. The 1713 Principia is therefore not only an intellectual document but a forensic exhibit in one of the most acrid scientific quarrels of the period. Newton's lunar theory, as recast under Cotes's editorial pressure, is built on the very observations whose owner was at the same moment attempting to recall them from circulation; the elegant new propositions on lunar motion in Book III are, materially, the spoils of the Flamsteed quarrel. Cotes seems to have understood the awkwardness perfectly well and never raised it in correspondence. The result, in any case, is that the 1713 contains a lunar theory accurate to within a few minutes of arc — a substantial improvement on 1687 and the empirical basis on which Maupertuis and Clairaut would later test the predictions of Newtonian gravitation against the observed motion of the apsides of the lunar orbit, the test that finally settled the eighteenth-century debate over whether universal gravitation was sufficient to account for the moon. The print run of the second edition is famous: 750 copies, against perhaps 250 of the first. Bentley's accounts have survived and show that the total cost of printing came to £117 4s 1½d; he sold 375 copies to booksellers and individuals at an average of 13s each, with Crownfield the printer taking a further 200 at 11s, yielding Bentley a profit of about £200 while still leaving substantial stock. Cotes, who did the actual intellectual work, received twelve presentation copies and no money. Some seventy or so further copies are recorded in a distribution list among Newton's papers as having been sent to named recipients across Europe — Cassini, de la Hire, Varignon, Johann and Daniel Bernoulli, Leibniz, Machin — together with the major academies, royal libraries and university collections from Paris to St Petersburg. The personal presentation to Queen Anne on 27 July 1713 is documented separately, as is a copy Newton sent to Yale. Voltaire, who had learned Newtonian physics from Maupertuis after his return from England in 1729, wrote the Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (1738) using the second edition; his personal copy survives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Émilie du Châtelet, working with Clairaut on her French translation through the 1740s and published posthumously in 1759 as Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle — still the only French translation Newton has ever had — used the 1713 as her primary base, collated against the 1726 third edition. The 1713 is therefore not merely the second edition: it is the edition through which Newtonian became a synonym for modern in eighteenth-century European thought, and copies in unrestored or near-unrestored contemporary bindings, with the original endpapers preserved, are markedly less common on the market than the standard sale catalogues suggest. References: Babson 12 — Wallis 8 — Gray 8 — Babson Suppl. p. 8 — Norman 1587 — Gjertsen, Newton Handbook, pp. 463–4 and 475–6 — Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia (1971), chapters VII–IX — ESTC T93210 — PMM 161 (for the first edition). 4to (235 × 190 mm), pp. [xxviii], 484, [8]. Engraved Cambridge University arms vignette on the title by Samuel Gribelin (signed S.G. at lower edge), one folding engraved plate of the cometary orbit at p. 465, woodcut diagrams throughout the text, woodcut head- and tail-pieces and initials. Paper a fine European laid stock, chain lines horizontal at 25 mm spacing, watermark a star with curling ornament (visible in several gatherings, consistent with imported Dutch paper of the period). Contemporary English calf, blind-tooled rectangular panel on the boards, raised bands on the spine with double gilt fillets at the bands, single red morocco lettering-piece gilt NEWTON'S / PRINCIPIA / MATHEMATICA, edges sprinkled red; spine and corners sympathetically renewed using the original spine leather where possible, original pastedowns and free endleaves preserved. Old waterstaining at the upper outer corner of the title and at the fore-edges of the first and last gatherings, not affecting text; old ink mark and minor surface marks to the upper cover; the body of the text crisp and clean throughout, the engraved plate fresh, the corrigenda leaf at the rear present.
Item #6668
Price: $55,000.00
