Peter McLaughlin The Impact of Newton on Biology on the Continent in the Eighteenth

In order to understand the reception of Newton in biology in the eighteenth century we must first decide what we mean by biology and characterize those aspects of Newton’s work that can plausibly be thought to have had some impact on the life sciences in the eighteenth century. When Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century despaired of a ‘Newton’ of the organic world, ‘who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered,’ he alluded to what must have been a widespread expectation (Kant 2000, 271). He concretized the hoped-for impact in a figure of argument that was to take on a life of its own in the nineteenth century: Whereas Johannes Kepler had shown how the phenomena of nature could be subjected to lawlike mathematical description, Newton could explain these laws on the basis of general natural causes (Kant 2007, 109). A Newton of the glass blade would have provided a mechanistic causal explanation of the organism in terms of general properties of matter. We shall see that the impact of Newton on biology of the eighteenth century lay in the resources he provided for just such a mechanistic or reductionistic theory of the organism.