ABSTRACT
Hobbes ‘classic works had appeared in the forties and fifties of the seventeenth century; Newton’s Principia was finished in 1687. During the intervening generation English thought was affected to a considerable extent by the writings of men like More, Cudworth, and Barrow, but more powerfully moved by the discoveries and publications of the great physicist and chemist Robert Boyle. Newton’s thinking on ultimate problems bears as obvious marks of his lucid and many-sided mind as it does of the religious meta-physic of the Cambridge leader. For Boyle, although not commonly recognized as such, was a thinker of genuine philosophical calibre.
