KEILL, JOHN

    was carried out primarily through his major work, Introductio ad veram physicam ... (1701), based on the series of experimental lectures on Newtonian natural philosophy he had been giving at Oxford since 1694. The first such lectures ever given, their attempt to derive Newton's laws experimentally did much to influence later publications. Although Keill makes the decidedly anti-Newtonian principle of the infinite divisibility of matter in nature a fundamental axiom, the Introductio again unfavorably contrasts Cartesian mechanism, with its dangers of atheism, and Newtonianism. Descartes's insufficient use of geometry, his attempt to define the essences of things rather than being content merely to describe their major properties, and his desire to explain the complex before he can adequately deal with the simple distinguish his fictions from the true principles of Newton. An appendix to the Introductio gives a proof for the law of centrifugal “force,” whose magnitude had been announced in 1673 by Christiaan Huygens. Several years after the Introductio, Keill published an article on the laws of attraction, dealing mainly with shortrange forces between small particles, in which he elaborated on Newtonian hypotheses that Newton himself had been unable to pursue.

Some of Keill's writings also brought hostile attacks against Newtonianism from the Continent. For example, his charge that Leibniz had plagiarized from Newton's invention of the calculus gave rise to a major dispute between English and Continental natural philosophers, in which Keill served as Newton's “avowed Champion.” Keill's article on the laws of attraction also brought criticisms from the Continent against the employment in Newtonianism of such dubious philosophical concepts as attraction.

In 1700 Keill was elected fellow of the Royal Society. Support from Henry Aldrich, dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, helped Keill's preferment, particularly in becoming deputy to Millington in 1699, just after the attack on Burnet, Whiston, and Bentley. In 1709 Robert Harley helped Keill become treasurer for the refugees from the Palatinate, in which connection he traveled to New England. From 1712 to 1716, with Harley's help, he was a decipherer to Queen Anne.

Keill's uncle was John Cockburn, a controversial Scottish clergyman with Jacobin sympathies. His brother, James, with help from John, tried to apply Newtonian principles to medicine; at his death James left a large sum of money to John. John's marriage in 1717 to Mary Clements, many years his junior and of lesser social standing, was the cause of some scandal. Besides her, Keill was survived by a son, who became a linen draper in London.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. ORIGINAL WORKS.

Introductio ad veram physicam, accedunt Christiani Hugenii theoremata de vi centrifuga et motu circulari demonstrata ... (Oxford, 1701) was translated as An Introduction to Natural Philosophy, or Philosophical Lectures Read in the University of Oxford ... (London, 1720); when Newtonianism began to make inroads in France, it was translated into French. An Examination of Dr Burnet's Theory of the Earth. Together With Some Remarks on Mr Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1698) includes, in the 1734 ed., Maupertuis's Dissertation on the Celestial Bodies. Keill answered Burnet's and Whiston's defenses in An Examination of the Reflections on the Theory of the Earth. Together With a Defence of the Remarks on Mr Whiston's New Theory (Oxford, 1699). Introductio ad veram astronomiam, seu lectiones astronomicae ... (Oxford, 1718) was translated as An Introduction to the True Astronomy; or, Astronomical Lectures ... (London, 1721) and also appeared in French. “On the Laws of Attraction and Other Principles of Physics” is in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, no. 315 (1708), p. 97. “Response aux auteurs des remarques, sur le différence entre M. de Leibnitz et M. Newton,” in Journal litéraire de la Haye, 2 (1714), 445-453, is one of several articles by Keill on the calculus controversy. He edited the Commercium epistolicum D. Johannis Collins, et aliorum, de analysi promota ... (London, 1712), which contains the original documents bearing on the Newton-Leibniz controversy. Samuel Halkett and John Laing, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, II (Edinburgh, 1926), 202, cite a contemporary MS note in attributing authorship of Martin Strong [pseud.], An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning. In a Letter From a Gentleman in the City to His Friend at Oxford (London, 1701), to John Arbuthnot and Keill. “Theoremata quaedam infinitam materiae divisibilitatem spectantia, quae ejusdem raritatem et tenuem compositionem demonstrans, quorum ope plurimae in physica tolluntur difficultates” is in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, no. 339 (1714), p. 82. There are letters from Keill in Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, J. Edleston, ed. (London, 1850). Two boxes of Keill MSS, including some letters, drafts of lectures, notebooks, and an inventory of his library are in the Lucasian Papers at Cambridge University Library.

II. SECONDARY LITERATURE.

There has been very little attention given to Keill by historians of science, and mention of him generally is found only in connection with the controversy over the calculus. Among Newton's biographers, Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, I (Edinburgh, 1855), pp. 335, 341-342, II, pp. 43-44, 53, 69; and Frank Manuel, Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 271-278, 321-323, 329, 335-338, 351, 399, 456, discuss Keill. There is a section on Keill's approach to natural philosophy in E. W. Strong, “Newtonian Explications of Natural Philosophy,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 18 (1957), 49-83. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem