Helmholtz and the conservation of energy: contexts of creation and reception

Equally telling is the omission of any reference to the Boyle Lectures that Boyle founded, which should surely have been taken up to illustrate the effective synthesis of science and religion represented by the tradition of physico-theology that flourished throughout the eighteenth century. Along with this goes a slight narrowness in the book’s conception. Thomas Hobbes nowhere appears in it, yet at least some reference to Hobbes would have been useful in drawing attention to the source of the widespread anxiety that existed about the supposedly atheistic corollaries of the new science, which in Waddell’s exposition is slightly hard to understand. We could also have heard more about the fashionable penumbra of the new science as it spread to the salons and coffee houses (referred to in the book’s blurb but not mentioned at all in its text), and the extent to which ‘wits’ rather than scientists made the running in the abandonment of magic which is here seen as characteristic of the Enlightenment. Lastly, the book is slightly unfortunate in its timing, in that its author did not have the opportunity to read William R. Newman’s magisterial study, Newton the Alchemist (2019), which once and for all scotches the view that Newton’s alchemy formed the source of his ideas about gravitation. Here, this claim is reprised at length on the basis of the writings of B.J.T. Dobbs and R.S. Westfall, forming the climax to the chapter on alchemy which is thus unfortunately already dated. Hence Waddell’s volume displays various shortcomings. In spite of these, however, it should have some value in providing students with a serviceable introduction to the complex interrelationship between magic, science and religion in this pivotal period.