SOURCE: "Force, Electricity, and the Powers of Living Matter in Newton's Mature Philosophy of Nature," in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, edited by Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 95-117.

In the essay below, Home focuses on the concept of force as a component in Newton's theories of natural phenomena.

One of Newton's most widely quoted methodological pronouncements appears in the preface he prepared for the first (1687) edition of his Principia. "The whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this," Newton there wrote: "from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena."¹ He made the same point in his other great work, his Opticks, towards the end of the long, final Query that he added to the Latin edition published in 1706:

To tell us...