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1996
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Jean Baillon, « Les manuscrits religieux de Newton et leur occultation », Dix-Huitième Siècle (documents), ID : 10.3406/dhs.1996.2121
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Jean-François Bâillon : Newton's religious manuscripts and their exclusion from the canon. This article attempts to assess the impact of Newton's manuscripts on their first readers (heirs, editors, biographers). Instead of seing the fact that they were ignored as the result of positivistic prejudices, the author suggests that it was rather their heterodox contents that frightened readers who were concerned to maintain an ideological solidarity between official science and the national religion. An analysis of the manuscripts themselves in the light of this hypothesis shows that they undermine the authority of the clergy in a way that could at the time seem close to certain deistic theses. Paradoxically, the very existence of a positivistic myth about Newton was made possible by the fact that, for theological reasons, Newton's religious manuscripts were removed from the canon of his writings.
