Reading Locke and Newton as Literature

Abstract

What does one expect from a title like 'Reading Locke and Newton as Literature'? Maybe some account of their prose style, or, more broadly, of their rhetoric, as it contributes to the persuasive quality of what they are arguing for. Well, it would certainly be possible to include my particular concerns, plus plenty of other matters, under the broad umbrella of rhetoric. But what I really want to do is discuss Locke and Newton in terms which would not seem out of place in a course on poetry or drama or, more especially, fiction. I am thinking of such long-standing critical topics as narration, point of view, characteristic diction, patterns of images or exempla, quality of mimetic detail, even creative myth-making or imaginative range. And I am interested not so much in how these things contribute to the arguments of Locke and Newton as in how they don't: that is to say, in how the excesses and unpredictabilities of these authors' literary invention go beyond the philosophy (or natural philosophy in Newton's case) in ways that, while not always subversive of the philosophic purpose, manage to seem somehow self-sustaining. Obviously my two authors are not among those philosophical changelings whom poets are fond of claiming as their brethren, like Plato or Nietzsche. No librarian has ever had second thoughts about shelving Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding or Newton's Opticks. What follows is, I suppose, an attempt to provide grounds for such an idiosyncratic librarian. I should add that, although this paper contains few specific debts to them, I nevertheless feel hovering over its pages the presence of three former teachers in Toronto's English department: I am thinking of Kenneth MacLean and Rosalie Colie on Locke and F.E.L. Priestley on Newton.