Newton: Proofs of a Conspiracy...pp. 107-113

 Now we deal with Newton. Sir Isaac Newton, to be more specific. This is going to be a very interesting section for the reason that I'm a bit familiar with Newton's natural philosophy (re: science). Yes, of course, we are all familiar with his mechanics and gravitational theory. Newton also believed in the aether, committing to the claim that, in the words of Greek Philosopher Parmenides, that which is not, is not, and cannot be. Newton means that the void is impossible. There cannot be space that is truly empty, there always must be something that fills it, to provide the action at a distance of gravity. The Earth and the Moon are locked in a gravitational dance, but the force of gravity has to work through something. That something is the quintessential ether (that's a word joke as "quintessential" means "fifth element"). 

Robison has just come off a long rant about how the Illuminati was going to refrain from teaching the truth of religion (he means Christianity, but he doesn't explain which Christianity he wants them to teach). So then a sharp pivot towards introducing Newton whom he introduces, "Our immortal Newton, whom the philosophers of Europe look up to as the honour of our species..."

And it goes on. 

Newton's gravitational proof overturned Aristotle's claim that things fell because they were heavy. Up until Newton, one should remember, Aristotle's Physics held for over two thousand years. Newton's held for a couple of centuries until Einstein. These three each shifted the paradigm for natural inquiry. Newton cannot be praised highly enough for this...but I'm wondering what he's doing here. Before we move on, I'll offer a guess--Newton was in a kind of controversy over his discovery and some religious figures who didn't think gravity gelled with the Bible. I think Robison is going to argue that gravity proves god. Newton's controversy was very minor, and Newton reasserted his religious allegiance (he was a doomsday nutter and an alchemist too) and everyone left it aside.

Robison, after a bit of lauding the gravitational discovery of Newton, quotes him at the end of his work. I'm not going to reproduce the quote in its entirety, because Robison uses a three-paragraph long quotation where Newton talks about his love for god, and how we can not perceive how god perceives in the same way that a blind man cannot perceive colors. 

This quote comes from the appendix to the second edition of Newton's "Principia Mathematica" called the "General Scholium." This is Newton appending his scientific work with his views on how it works within theology. Alright, let's put a pin in this and continue on with the work. 

Robison then moves on to a Delaplace, which I think he means Pierre Laplace, who expanded on Newton's work. Laplace was an interesting fellow who once claimed that if he had perfect knowledge of one particle he could derive the entire past and present of the universe. This is impossible of course, because that kind of knowledge doesn't exist, but it's an interesting claim about a deterministic universe. What is Laplace doing here? 

Robison leaves Laplace with another long quote, in this Laplace comments that it is a folly that man believes that he is at the center of all the motions of gravity and the planets. That our greatest mistake is in assuming that all of the creation is for us. We are no more important to nature as a citizen of Pelew (he means Palau) is to France (Palau was a Spanish-controlled colony at the time). Laplace goes on, "Far be from us the dangerous maxim, that it is sometimes useful to depart from these, and to deceive men, in order to insure their happiness; but cruel experience has shewn us that these laws are never totally extinct."

Laplace's point is that we should never forget that we are not the center of nature, and pretending that we are in order to keep people happy may be useful but it is incorrect. Again I ask, what is Laplace doing here? 

From Newton to Laplace to David (king of the Jews). David here reiterates his place in the order of the world, saying that people are just lower on the hierarchy than the angels. Ok, I'm still confused but no matter as Robison name drops Francis Bacon, John Locke, and then another mathematician Daniel Bernoulli.  

He stops name-dropping here and eventually gets to the point. These four pages were all set up to the conclusion that Adam Weishaupt is wrong because these five men believed in an afterlife. My earlier guess was wrong because I was giving Robison too much credit. Robison writes, "Were this a proper place for considering the question as a question of science or truth, I would say, that every man who has been a successful student of nature, and who will rest his conclusions on the same maxims of probable reasoning that have procured him success in his past researches, will consider it as next to certain that there is another state of existence for rational man."

Let's dispense with this right away, and reject the premise. Robison asks if this were a proper place for considering the afterlife as a matter of the science of truth. It is not. It is not a scientific question in that it cannot be answered with objective means. We will all find out, but we aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Secondly, the methodology by which Newton, Laplace, Bernoulli, etc. became successful cannot be honestly applied to theological questions as they are non-overlapping magesteria. The person to ask would be someone with a doctorate in theology, which we have in Adam Weishaupt, for whom Robison is rejecting. 

The larger point that Robison is trying to make is that Illuminism is terrible because it dashes the hope that people place in the afterlife. While that may make people turn away from the Illuminati it does not make them wrong. The existence of Hell is a similar dashing of hope but I'm not seeing Robison chiding that for putting people off of the idea that the God of Christianity is about vengeance not justice. 

Even if, Robison was correct, this is just a polemic playing on the religious sensibilities of the reader. Robison should just be content that people will look at the Deistic doctrine of the Illuminati and say, "not for me;" condemning the group to a slow death in the marketplace of ideas. Where I thought he was going was to use Newton's order of the universe to make an argument from design. This argument would be bad and as much of a non-sequitur as the one Robison does present, but it would have been a much more apt use of Newton and Laplace than the "well they think there's an afterlife too" argument that is thrown in here.

I still don't know what the point is though. Why go to this trouble when Robison still hasn't proven the conspiracy itself? The most that we have gotten is from the title thus far. and we are approaching the half way point.