Newton's Copy of Leibniz's Theodicee: With Some Remarks on the Turned-Down Pages of

Books in Newton's Library

Author(s): I. Bernard Cohen
Source: Isis, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), pp. 410-414
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/231444
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NOTES & CORRESPONDENCE

NEWTON'S COPY OF LEIBNIZ'S THEODICEE:

WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE TURNED-DOWN PAGES OF BOOKS
IN NEWTON'S LIBRARY

By I. Bernard Cohen*

It is well known that in the Principia Newton does not mention Keple
relation to the first two laws of planetary motion, but does so only in
the third or harmonic law. For the rest, Kepler appears in that great w
relation to his observations (together with those of his pupils) on com
views as to the nature of comets' tails.' It is therefore of more than
interest that Newton should have contemplated adding a sentence to t
concerning Kepler's views on dynamics. The key to this episode is to be
turned-down or dog-eared page of a book in Newton's library: Leibni
cee, dog-earing being a practice to which John Harrison has called at
Newton kept at least two special copies of the Principia (London
of them interleaved-for recording proposed alterations to be introdu
second edition; he had at least two such copies of the second edition (C
1713) for the same purpose. In the interleaved copy of the second ed
served in Newton's library, there is a proposed annotation to the third
in which Newton evidently intended to contrast his own concept of
Kepler's. The context of this discussion is especially significant since N
responsible for the introduction of "inertia" into the discourse of ph
now-classic signification.3 He had picked up the term by reading the
dence of Descartes, where it appears in an exchange of letters betwe

*Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachuse

'Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 3rd ed. (1726) with v
ings, ed. A. Koyre, I. B. Cohen, and Anne Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 562 (Bk. 3, Hypothesis 7 in 1st ed., B
enon 4 in 2nd and 3rd eds.), 886. In the tract De motu . . ., written in 1684, just b
began to write the Principia, he gave Kepler credit for both the area law and the law of e
(see scholium following Problem 4); this text has been published by S. P. Rigaud, by
Ball, by A. R. Hall and Marie Boas Hall, by J. W. Herivel, and again by D. T. White
Cohen, Introduction to Newton's "Principia" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pres
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971; 1978).
2Harrison remarks on Newton's "characteristic method of marking passages" by folding the cor-
ners of pages carefully and exactly, so that the point indicates a word or phrase or sentence of "special
significance or interest for him": John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge/London:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 25. In Newton's copy of Mariotte's Oeuvres in two volumes
(Leiden, 1717; Harrison 1031), the lower corner of p. 226 has been folded so that the tip indicates the
sentence, "Le savant Mr. Newton a fait une hypothese nouvelle & fort surprenante pour expliquer tous
ces effetz." Harrison does not mention specific dog-eared pages in Newton's copy of the Theodicee.
3Newton is responsible for the distinction between mass and weight and for equating mass and
inertia. He even recognized that it was only by experiment that he could establish the proportionality
in any given body of mass as a measure of resistance to acceleration and mass as a determinant of
weight or gravitational force in a gravitational field (or the equivalence of inertial and gravitational
mass). In the Principia Newton wrote of both "inertia" and "force of inertia" (vis inertiae). But this
"force" was not an acceleration-producing force like the forces of percussion or pressure or centripe-
tal forces. Rather, this "Vis inertiae is"-as Newton explained in Query 31 of the Opticks-"a

ISIS, 1982, 73 (268) 410

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 NEWTON'S COPY OF LEIBNIZ 411

and Mersenne in which Kepler's name is not mentioned. In an act of

transformation, Newton took Kepler's term "inertia" (without apparently
ing it was Kepler's), and applied it to a quite different concept of his own,
in turn, was a transformation of a Cartesian concept.4 Some time after 17
the second edition of the Principia had been published, Newton felt imp
clarify the difference between what Kepler meant by inertia and what he
understood by this term. Accordingly, he wrote out a sentence to that en
revised it slightly, and copied it out in the margin of one of his copies of reco
the second edition (London, 1713), as follows:

Non intelligo vim inertiae Kepleri I do not mean Kepler's force of in

qua corpora ad quietem tendunt sed by which bodies tend to rest, but the f
vim manendi in eodem seu quiescendi of remaining in the same state wheth
seu movendi statu. resting or moving.

This is the first recorded association by Newton of Kepler's name with

"inertia."5 Among the Newton papers in the Cambridge University L
Add. 3965, fol. 423), there is another version of this same sentence, i
Newton has struck out the work "Kepleri," and has replaced it by "al
so that he is now contrasting his own idea of inertia and that of some
"others." This proposed addition does not appear in the third edi
Principia (London, 1726).
One source of Newton's knowledge concerning the Keplerian concept of inertia
is Leibniz's Essais de Theodicee sur la bonte de dieu, la liberte de l'homme et
l'origine du mal (Amsterdam, 1710). Since the years from 1710 until Leibniz's
death in 1716 were a time of intense rivalry and controversy between Newton and
Leibniz, Newton would naturally have been interested in anything Leibniz wrote
that discussed Newton; the Theodicee-as we shall see-does discuss Newton,
and is also one of the few books (perhaps the only book) by an author in those
years that discussed Keplerian inertia in reference to Kepler.6
On page 27 of this work Leibniz says that "modern philosophers" have rejected
the concept of bodies acting on one another at a distance, and he adds that he is of
the same opinion. But such "action at a distance," he is forced to admit, has just
been reintroduced in England by "l'excellent M. Newton," who holds that it is
"of the nature of bodies" to attract one another in proportion to their masses. In
Newton's copy of this book, now preserved in the Trinity College Library (call no.
NQ 8.82, Harrison 571), I found that page 27 has a crease. I measured the distance
from the crease to the comer of the page and found that when folded down, the tip
would have exactly pointed to the sentence about Newton and gravitation acting at
a distance. Newton had also turned down the corner on page 141, as again cur-
rently evidenced by a crease in the page. Here (Pt. 1, ?30) Leibniz introduces

passive Principle by which Bodies persist in their Motion or Rest" and thus cannot ever act by
"putting Bodies into Motion," or changing their state of motion or of rest. See also I. B. Cohen, The
Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge/London/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), and R. S.
Westfall, Force in Newton's Physics (London: Macdonald; New York: American Elsevier, 1971).
4For details, see Cohen, Newtonian Revolution, pp. 182-189.
5For details, see I. B. Cohen, "Newton and Keplerian Inertia: An Echo of Newton's Controversy
with Leibniz," in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance: Essays to Honor Walter Pagel,
ed. Allen G. Debus (New York: Science History, 1972), Vol. II, pp. 199-211. This extract was
recorded in the interleaved copy of the Principia (1713), now in the Cambridge University Library
(call no. Adv. b.39.2; Harrison 1169). The slip of paper with an earlier draft, differing but slightly
from the quoted version, is bound into the volume.
6In the year of Leibniz's death (1716), another work mentioning Kepler and inertia was published
by Jakob Hermann. But, as we shall see below, Hermann did not get Kepler's views correct and
attributed to Kepler the statement concerning inertia found in Def. 3 of Newton's Principia.

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412 I. BERNARD COHEN

inertia under the name of "l'inertie naturelle des corps," which he itali
says was used by "the celebrated Kepler" and "after him by M. Descarte
then gives an example of identical ships being carried along by the cur
river; some are heavily loaded with stone, the others lightly loaded with t
the motion is caused entirely by the current (and not in any way aided b
oars, etc.), then-according to Leibniz-the boats with the heavy loads wi
downriver more slowly than the boats with the light loads.7 Later
Leibniz refers to Kepler ("Mathematicien moderne des plus excellens") w
mentioned the "natural inertia" of matter, "which gives it a resistance to
by which a greater mass receives less speed from a same force." Her
states unequivocally the Keplerian principle exemplified in these boats
down the river. Newton's addition to Definition 3 would make it clear that his
"inertia" was not "Kepler's force of inertia" (or "the force of inertia of others
that resists motion or tends to bring moving bodies to rest, but rather somethin
that tends to keep bodies in whatever state they might be in-whether at rest or
motion in a straight line at constant speed.
The marked passage in Newton's copy of Leibniz's Theodicee leaves no room
for doubt concerning its role in calling Newton's attention in a forcible way t
Kepler's concept of inertia. We do not know when this occurred, however, sin
there is no record as to when Newton obtained his copy of the Theodicee, and h
did not include a date in his proposed emendation to the Principia. Now the reade
may wonder why, if Newton contemplated making this amendment to the Princ
pia on the basis of a 1710 book, he did not do so before the second edition of the
Principia was published in 1713; that is, why did Newton wait until at least three
years after Leibniz's book had appeared before entering the note about Kepler's
inertia and his own? The fact is that when Leibniz's Theodicee was published (i.e.,
by early 1710), the first 224 pages of the new edition had already been composed,
proofread, and printed off. This proposed emendation was hardly of such crucial
importance as to warrant the trouble and expense of resetting and printing a page
and substituting it for the one containing Definition 3.
Newton's library contains another potential source of inspiration for the emen-
dation: Jakob Hermann's Phoronomia, which appeared in 1716, three years after
the second edition of the Principia. This work also refers to Kepler's inertia,
mentioning "a certain passive Force, from which no motion or tendency to motion
results." It consists of a "Reluctance" ("consistit in Renixu") to a body's having
its "state" (of either "motion or rest") changed by the application of an external
force. "This force of resistance," according to Hermann "is, by a most significant
word, called Vis inertiae by the outstanding great astronomer Joh. Kepler." After
a discussion of the properties of this vis inertiae, Hermann says: "On this Force of
inertia of matter is founded the law of Nature, that To any action there is an equal
and opposite reaction."8 Curiously enough, Hermann here attributes Newton's
own original concept of the vis inertiae to Kepler and even paraphrases Newton's
very words concerning it in so doing.9 Hence Hermann's discussion could have
provided a sufficient occasion for Newton's proposed amendment. But there are

7If two boats were at rest, say being moored side by side, and their hawsers were cut simultaneous-
ly, the boat with the heavy load would be accelerated less than the boat with the light load, and so at
the start of the motion the former would move more slowly than the latter; but this situation is vastly
different from what occurs when both boats reach their maximum (identical) speed. Leibniz is
apparently still mired in pre-Newtonian physics, in which motion results from a force (provided by the
river current) and the speed is reckoned by the motive force diminished in some unspecified way by
the resistance or reluctance to being moved. See also Cohen, "Newton and Keplerian Inertia."
8Jakob Hermann, Phoronomia (Amsterdam, 1716), p. 3, ??1 1, 12.
9Newton, Principia, Def. 3; this is discussed in Cohen, Newtonian Revolution, pp. 144-145.
Kepler never wrote of a "state" of motion as Newton, following Descartes, did.

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 NEWTON'S COPY OF LEIBNIZ 413

no pen or pencil marks on page 3 of Newton's copy of the Phoronomia (Harrison

756); pages 113 and 394 are turned down, but not page 3. Page 113 contains
references to Leibniz and Huygens; page 394 to Newton's Principia, Book 2,
Proposition 37. Newton did not, apparently, read through this book carefully. At
least, he did not turn down several pages in it that mention sections of the Princi-
pia, not even page 7, which presents Newton's conclusion "that the gravities or
weights of bodies are proportional to their Masses."'0 Since Newton tended to
dog-ear every reference to himself in his books, we may seriously question wheth-
er he actually read the discussion of a supposed Keplerian inertia on page 3 of the
Phoronomia. What a contrast this makes with the degree of surety with which we
can say that Newton must have read Leibniz's discussion of this same topic!
Another interesting example of a book in which Newton's dog-earing may be
significant is the Latin Optice. Alexandre Koyre and I called attention to the fact
that the original page 315 was canceled and replaced by a substitute. Instead of
referring to "an Incorporeal, Living, Intelligent, Omnipresent Being, who in
infinite Space, as if in his Sensorium" ("tanquam Sensorio suo"), as in the
substitute, Newton had at first written and published (in the cancellandum) "Spa-
tium Universum, Sensorium est Entis Incorporei, Viventis, & Intelligentis"
("Universal Space is the Sensorium of an Incorporeal, Living & Intelligent Be-
ing"; ultimate paragraph of Query 20, which became Query 28 in the later English
editions). "I We also called attention to another reference to the word "sensorium"
on page 346, in the sentence, "Voluntate sua corpora omnia in infinito suo Sen-
sorio movere" ("By his will to move all bodies in his infinite Sensorium"; in the
later English versions, this may be found in the antepenultimate paragraph of the
final Query 31, ". . . by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uni-
form Sensorium"). It might be assumed that Newton may have forgotten this
second (and later) occurrence of the word "sensorium," but-as Harrison points
out-the dog-earing, by which the corner of page 346 was made to point to this
word, shows that Newton was fully aware of this second occurrence of a reference
to God's sensorium.'2
In the description of Newton's copy of the 1706 Optice in the catalogue, Harri-
son mentions that there are "significant signs of dog-earing of pp. 29 . . ." (he
then lists all pages which had once been turned down), and he rightly calls atten-
tion to the importance of his own discovery of the dog-earing of page 346. But in
the case of the Theodicee we are merely told that there are "a few signs of dog-
earing," without reference to specific pages. It is certainly to be hoped that such
information about dog-eared pages, and dog-eared pages that have been straight-
ened out, will be speedily recorded and introduced into the next edition of this
magnificent research tool. This would be an effective safeguard against any later
alteration of these books by an act of carelessness or of intent, as by an overzeal-
ous librarian.
There is one further aspect of Newton's dog-earing that should be put on record.
I have mentioned the fact that some books have no pages presently folded over,
but only bear signs (crease marks) of an earlier dog-earing. In some volumes not
only are there pages which evidently had once been dog-eared and are so no
longer, but there are also other pages which are still folded over. Did Newton

'?Given in Newton, Principia, 1st ed., p. 305 (Bk.2, Prop. 24, Corollary 7).
"Isaac Newton, Optice (London, 1706) (Harrison 1162). See Alexandre Koyrd and I. Bernard
Cohen, "The Case of the Missing Tanquam: Leibniz, Newton, & Clarke," Isis, 1961, 52:556-566;
reprinted, with Koyre and Cohen, "Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence . . ." (Archives
Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 1962, 15:63-126) as part of the introduction to a facsimile
edition of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence (New York: Arno Press, 1981).
l2Harrison, Library, pp. 25-26. On the development of the Queries, see Henry Guerlac's edition of
the Opticks, with variant readings (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Univ. Press).

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414 I. BERNARD COHEN

himself return these folded-over pages to their original state? Or was this done b
later owner, a bookseller, or a member of the library staff? If done by Newton,
process of canceling the foldings could have an intellectual significance. Har
rejects the idea that "some tidy-minded librarian or bookseller might reason
be presumed to have straightened out . . . the bulk of the page corners ear
turned back." He does so on the grounds that several volumes in which the p
have been straightened out still contain "some pages with corners still bent
But I believe it can be argued that any librarian who was so careless of his trust t
he did not keep Newton's books in the state in which they were turned over
library would not have been so careful and thorough as to find every such
eared page.13

'3Harrison, Library, p. 26; he hypothesizes that it was Newton himself who had straightened out
some pages, and is accordingly forced into the following position: "I conclude therefore that Newton
came back to these pages, did with them whatever he had in mind to do, and then, having finished his
business, tidied them up."

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