ABSTRACT

The doctrine of occult qualities, as articulated and defended in early-modern scholasticism, remains imperfectly understood. However, that the scholastic doctrine of occult qualities, as strictly construed in the period, is disjunctive, not conjunctive, with its esoteric irepresentations. Ross, similarly, notes that people can produce esoteric effects via a phantasie and prejudicate opinion; but this is precisely not the same as the operation upon them of an occult quality. On the doctrine of occult qualities, not-knowing is essentially nescience: an encounter with unknowable facts. The latter is he hermeneutic mode of coming to know new facts; but nescience-scientia, as we have just seen, is not fundamentally interested in coming to know new facts. Thus Newton absolutely did not reintroduce to science any idea of occult qualities in the strict scholastic sense. Rather, he kept with the idea of sympathies and antipathies in the more modish, esoteric sense.