ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief sketch of Roger North's early education and his year of study at Cambridge University between 1667 and 1668. The first detail concerns North's student status, about which, in Notes of Me, he remarks: 'nothing extraordinary happned to me, unless it were, that I was forct to live in the quality of a nobleman, with a very strait allowance'. Because of his penury North resided in the same room as his brother John, who had chambers in Jesus College and who acted as his tutor. North's term, 'New Philosofy', denotes the Cartesian way of philosophising about matter and motion, a way in which God's veracity and causal powers are required only to set the general background for any particular interactions among bodies. North's autobiographical fragment was written at a time when he had attained a relative tranquillity of spirit, whereas prior to his removal to Norfolk, he had experienced a number of turning points or 'crises'.
