ABSTRACT
On the evening of 14 January 1706, William Nicolson of Carlisle, Divine and Fellow of the Royal Society, recorded in his diary details of a conversation held that day with the Earl of Carbury, the topic of which had been the various cosmological theories which had been proposed over the course of the previous twenty years: ‘This brought us into a Discourse about the several Systemes of Dr. Burnet, Dr. Woodward, etc., and his Lordship ingeniously enough observ’d that, since Des Cartes led the way Every New Philosopher thought himself wise enough to make a World.’1
In fact, there was little ingenuity in Carbury’s observation. In attributing credit (or in this case more probably blame) to the person of Descartes for having inspired English theories of the earth, Carbury was actually rehearsing what was then a widely held view. Fellow Clergyman Robert Jenkin had written in 1700 that Descartes’ system of the world ‘was the first Ground and Occasion to all the rest’; Newtonian John Keill similarly identified Descartes as ‘the first world maker this Century produced’, while John Edwards, a conservative champion of the geocentric view, complained that English cosmogonists had taken ‘Copernicus or Cartes to be better writers than Moses’.2 There is little doubt, then, if contemporary witnesses are to be believed, that Descartes’ hypotheses concerning the formation of the earth exerted a considerable influence on English cosmologies in the late seventeenth century. Even writers who had explicitly abandoned key elements of the Cartesian cosmology came to be regarded in some sense as his followers.
