ABSTRACT
The second Stadholderless age, which ran from 1702 to 1747, did not produce the political fireworks characteristic of the early, Radical Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic either. While the Radical Enlightenment petered out in the Dutch Republic, the philosophy which had served as its point of departure also rapidly lost much of its former lustre, for by the early 1700s, Cartesianism had become decidedly old fashioned. Isaac Newton's Principia mathematica was, and of course still is, a truly startling book which definitively demonstrated the deficiencies of Descartes's natural philosophy. In any account of the rise of Newtonianism in the Dutch Republic, Christiaan Huygens and de Volder should be mentioned first, for in 1687 they were the first Dutchmen to read the Principia. Physico-theology crossed confessional boundaries and did not produce the kind of sectarian divisions biblical theology had given rise to ever since the Reformation, and nowhere more so than in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.
