[Opponent of Isaac Newton] Hutchinson, John
Group of works
£429
Auction: 05 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
H[utchinson], J[ohn]. Moses's Sine Principio: represented by Names, by Words, by Types, by Emblems. With an Introduction, shewing the Nature of Body and Soul, the First State of Man … That by Reason of Man's Nature, and of his Fall, Persons, Things, and Actions, were represented by Substitutes, Types, and Emblems. London: W. Bowyer, 1729. First edition, 8vo, contemporary mottled calf gilt;
Idem. The Use of Reason Recovered, by the Date in Christianity. Whereby we know, the State we are in; that there are Elahim; what they have done for us; the state they offer us; the Terms upon which they offer it. London: H. Woodfall, 1736. [Bound with:] The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist, Delineated, supposed to have proceeded from Knowledge and Reasoning; but proved to have proceeded from Want of Both. London: H. Woodfall, 1736. First editions, 2 works in 1 volume, 8vo, contemporary mottled calf uniform with the preceding work, spine labels perished [Library Hub mentions a plate in The Religion of Satan but this not found in another copy inspected and possibly not called for];
Idem. A Treatise of Power Essential and Mechanical. Wherein the Original, and that Part of Religion which now is natural, is stated. London: by W. Bowyer, 1732. First edition, 8vo, contemporary mottled calf gilt uniform with the preceding volume;
and 15 other works, theology, Italian language, etc., 17th-19th century, leather-bound (26)
Provenance
From the library of the Murrays of Dollerie, Crieff, Perthshire.
Footnote
John Hutchinson's idiosyncratic polemics on natural philosophy and religion are notably rare on the market, an obscurity which with hindsight might seem inevitable in view of the stature of the man, indeed, the entire corpus of scientific discovery and thought, against which he set himself: 'They took as their principal target the publications of Isaac Newton … Hutchinson perceived early on the connection between Newton's ideas and the anti-trinitarian writings of Samuel Clarke, and denied wholeheartedly both the philosophy and the theology that underpinned these works. He rejected the idea of a vacuum and the concepts of attraction and of gravity … because they seemed to him to endow matter with activity and to imply that God might himself be material. Instead, Hutchinson argued that knowledge derived from the senses could not reach to the microscopic level at which God acted to create and govern the world. Revelation was the only sure key to these processes. Moreover, human understanding of revelation, which was provided by the Bible and in particular by those passages of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament that dealt with God's creative power, had been corrupted' (Scott Mandelbrote in ODNB).