h a title in England would have been inconceivable in 1711. Still less would it have been possible some 19 years before that, in 1692, the year that Newton turned 50 years old, exactly 100 years before Shelley's birth, and the year of the notorious Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. What had intervened by 1811, the year of Shelley's essay and six years before Frankenstein, was a mode of thought that may not have been specifically revolutionary but that had made revolution inevitable. So much for politics. What had also intervened, in science, was Newton.
Early in the 18th century in England, "there existed a populous discourse community that accepted the rhetoric of science" (Rabkin 39). This could be traced to the heir of the work of Galileo and Kepler in the early seventeenth century:
[Newton] radically altered man's view of his position in the universe. No longer was he the centre of things, the uniquely chosen manifestation of God. The telescope freed man to look at himself and the world about him. Since nothing was certain any more, and the "new philosophy called all in doubt," everything could and should be investigated (Burke 136).
In a similar vein, Sagan observes that Newton explained mathematically what had been suggested by direct observation of natural phenomena. Newton, he says,
was the first ever to figure out that . . . fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of Nature; that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skys; and that there is a resonance between the way we think and the way the world works . . . provid[ing] compelling evidence that, at an unexpectedly deep level, humans can understand the Cosmos (Sagan 69, 71).
Newton's mechanistic, mathematical concept of the universe survived scrutiny until Einstein came along. But the irrevocable cultural effect of Newton's work was to demystify divine force in the universe.
In the early seventeenth century, when the prevailing first principles in th...