Cadwallader Colden's Extension of the Newtonian Principles

Abstract

Ni o more audacious claim to intellectual eminence was ever made in colonial America than Cadwallader Colden's assertion, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that he had discovered the cause of gravitation. At that moment Sir Isaac Newton's fame was still rising. He had come to symbolize the values of the Enlightenment, which were being accepted more more in every realm of thought by informed men throughout the Western World. To them, Newton stood for a world governed by precisely predictable law. His laws of motion his law of universal gravitation offered hope that similar syntheses might reduce to simplicity all the apparent complexity of man's tangled mass of knowledge. Yet, although he had formulated precise laws by which the effects of gravitation could be predicted, Newton had stopped short of answering one question that to many seemed still more important. have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity [the observation of] phenomena, he wrote, and I frame no hypotheses.' What Newton could not discover from phenomena would not seek by hypothesis, Cadwallader Colden would attempt: he would find the cause of gravitation. He started to put together his thoughts upon this great subject at least as early as I743. In I744 he circulated among a few friends in New York Philadelphia a manuscript draft of his developing ideas. A small edition, still incomplete, was published in i746 SO that it could be offered to a wider circle of men of learning. It bore the title, An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; of the Cause of Gravitation.2 As soon as the first copies reached England, a pirated edi* Mr. Hindle is an associate professor of history at New York University. From 1948 to ig50 he was research associate at the Institute of Early American History Culture. 1 Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, edited by Florian Cajori the I737 edition (Berkeley, i946), p. 547. Hereafter cited as Newton, Principia. 2 It was published in New York dated 1745, but it did not appear until i746. See James Alexander to Cadwallader Colden, Jan. 30, 1745/46, The Letters Papers of Cadwallader Colden, 9 vols. (New-York Historical Society, Collections, L-LVI, LXVII-LXVIII), III (New York, i920), 194. Hereafter cited as Colden Papers.