Seeking Nature's Logic

The Scottish Enlightenment was a vital moment in the history of Western civilization. As one modern admirer of Scotland cogently wrote: No small nationexcept Greecehas ever achieved an intellectual and cultural breakthrough of this magnitude. Placing Isaac Newtons natural philosophy within a broad conceptual context, Seeking Natures Logic takes that science from Galileo to the early nineteenth century, concentrating on Scotland during the 120 years from 1690 to 1810a period defined by the publication of Newtons Principia in 1687 and the death of John Robison in 1805. Newtons work changed the course of natural philosophy, and Robison was the most significant natural philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment. As professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1774 to 1805, John Robison taught the premier science of the day at the premier science university of the time. He discovered experimentally that electrical and magnetic forces were, like gravity, inverse square forces, and he wrote influential treatises on electricity, magnetism, mechanics, and astronomy. By articulating a particularly Scottish approach to physics, he was the main conceptual link between Newton and those Scottish geniuses of Victorian physics, Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell. Seeking Natures Logic explains the background of Robisons natural philosophy, analyzes his own sharply shifting ideas, and places those ideas in the context of early nineteenth-century Scottish thought.