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This would lead to disorder and sin. Thus men prepare scourges for themselves, and vice is spread through a people. Let not Judah come near the idolatrous worship of Israel. For Israel was devoted to idols, and must now be let alone. When sinners cast off the easy yoke of Christ, they go on in sin till the Lord saith, Let them alone. Then they receive no more warnings, feel no more convictions: Satan takes full possession of them, and they ripen for destruction.
It is a sad and sore judgment for any man to be let alone in sin. Those who are not disturbed in their sin, will be destroyed for their sin. May we be kept from this awful state; for the wrath of God, like a strong tempest, will soon hurry impenitent sinners into ruin. Barnes' Notes on the Bible They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains - The tops of hills or mountains seemed nearer heaven, the air was purer, the place more removed from the world.
To worship the Unseen God upon them, was then the suggestion of natural feeling and of simple devotion. God Himself directed the typical sacrifice of Isaac to take place on a mountain; on that same mountain He commanded that the temple should be built; on a mountain, God gave the law; on a mountain was our Saviour transfigured; on a mountain was He crucified; from a mountain He ascended into heaven. Mountains and hills have accordingly often been chosen for Christian churches and monasteries. But the same natural feeling, misdirected, made them the places of pagan idolatry and pagan sins.
The Pagan probably also chose for their star and planet-worship, mountains or large plains, as being the places from where the heavenly bodies might be seen most widely. Being thus connected with idolatry and sin, God strictly forbade the worship on the high places, and as is the case with so many of God's commandments man practiced it as diligently as if He had commanded it. God had said, "Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations, which ye shall possess, served their gods upon the high mountains, and upon the hills and under every green tree" Deuteronomy But "they set them up images and groves rather images of Ashtaroth in every high hill and under every green tree, and there they burnt incense in all the high place, as did the pagan whom the Lord carried away before them" 2 Kings The words express, that this which God forbade they did diligently; "they sacrificed much and diligently; they burned incense much and diligently" ; and that, not here and there, but generally, "on the tops of the mountains," and, as it were, in the open face of heaven.
So also Ezekiel complains, "They saw every high hill and all the thick trees, and they offered there their sacrifices, and there they presented the provocation of their offering; there also they made their sweet savor, and poured out there their drink-offerings" Ezekiel Under oaks - white poplars and elms probably the terebinth or turpentine tree because the shadow thereof is good The darkness of the shadow suited alike the cruel and the profligate deeds which were done in honor of their false gods.
In the open face of day, and in secret they carried on their sin. Therefore their daughters shall commit whoredoms, and their spouses - or more probably, daughters-in-law shall commit adultery Or in the present commit adultery. The fathers and husbands gave themselves to the abominable rites of Baal-peor and Ashtaroth, and so the daughters and daughters-in-law followed their example.
This was by the permission of God, who, since they "glorified not" God as they ought, "gave them up," abandoned them, "to vile affections. The sins of the fathers descend very often to the children, both in the way of nature, that the children inherit strong temptations to their parents' sin, and by way of example, that they greedily imitate, often exaggerate, them. Wouldest thou not have children, which thou wouldest wish unborn, reform thyself. The saying may include too sufferings at the hands of the enemy.
Matthew Poole's Commentary They, both priests and people, sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains; where their altars were sometimes to God, sometimes to idols: Burn incense upon the hills; another piece of idolatry they practised, which as it usually was joined to their sacrifices, so is it here added by the prophet. This idolatry abounded in Israel, where without control it had been in use ever since their revolt, if not before: Under oaks; some say pines, or the alder. Poplars; the white poplar.
Elms; or lime-tree, or the tree whose boughs stretched out together cast a pleasant shadow. Under all these it is certain the ancient heathen did perform their idolatrous services; so did this people choose all these great trees which, having many and great boughs, do afford the darkest and coolest recesses, Ezekiel Because the shadow thereof is good; convenient for the sacrificers, while the smoke and smell of the sacrifice went up through the boughs, and the coolness of the shady place kept their persons from sultry heat; it may be they thought as the heathen did that the numen , deity, delighted to dwell or be often in such places.
Therefore; for these sins of yours, though you account them no sins, for your harmonizing with heathenish superstitions; for your leaving my temple, and, against my commands, sacrificing where best liketh you.
Geneva Study Bible They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: Open in a separate window. Producing reconstructed versions of his earlier experiments, he at last provided full specifications of his experimental set-ups and of the prism glass. And they should involve and educate employees, who can serve as powerful advocates to encourage their city leaders to take action in investing in our communities. We have received from them draughts of wisdom, of love, of joy, of guidance, of impulse, of comfort, which have been, as water in the desert is, more precious than gold.
Your daughters shall commit whoredom; shall dishonour themselves and their families by their lewdness and unlawful converse with fornicators. Here is spiritual whoredom punished with giving up daughters to their wandering lusts. Your spouses shall commit adultery; or, spouses of your sons , as the French version; a great unhappiness to any family, to be disparaged and wronged by adulteresses, and a grievous punishment, where or whensoever executed; and this is here foretold it will be so, not countenanced.
Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, The highest part of them, nearest to the heavens, where they built their altars to idols, and offered sacrifice unto them, as we often read in Scripture they did: As well as analysing rainbows, he discusses why objects are seen with different colours under particular circumstances, attributing the reason not to any intrinsic colour of any particular material but instead to the way in which it reflects or refracts light.
To conclude, Newton pursues a more philosophical vein. Colours, he insists, lie not in the medium and not in objects but in light rays—and since colours are qualities, the rays themselves must be made of a material substance. Claiming that his account would undoubtedly stimulate further research, Newton thoughtfully provides full instructions, including dimensions, for an experimental set-up that he had designed to demonstrate—not test—the validity of his propositions.
He recommends passing sunlight first through a prism and then through a lens on to a sheet of paper. By moving the paper backwards and forwards through the focal point, the refracted beam can, he reports, be seen splitting into colours and then reuniting into white light. However, even the incomplete trouble-shooting details he provides confirm how tricky it can be to obtain the desired effects. Adopting a tone suggesting he expects no response, Newton ends by inviting readers to let him know if he has made any mistakes.
The very last paragraph, presumably added by Oldenburg, warmly commends Newton's letter to its readers, but omits to mention that it had been surreptitiously edited. The suppression of these controversial claims is significant. Newton argues here not only that colour can be quantified but also that differential refrangibility is an established fact, not a testable hypothesis—yet this assertion rests on the unstated assumption that the geometrical laws of optics are valid.
Whoever removed these two sentences recognized the strength of its epistemic claims in the context of an article lacking experimental detail. Newton's paper carried two main implications for the future: Most obviously, Newton himself continued to experiment and to revise these early ideas. In addition, aiming to fulfil their own various agendas, natural philosophers picked up, developed and consolidated hints and suggestions made by Newton at different times.
As a consequence, what became known as Newtonian views were not necessarily identical either to each other or to the opinions voiced by Newton at any particular time. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Newton's prestige as the hero of an enlightened nation was secure. The marble statue in the ante-chapel of Trinity College Cambridge presents an elegantly dressed Newton who is not controlling the planets, but wielding a prism as if it were an orator's baton his apple was a nineteenth-century innovation. To see was to know, and by then even French natural philosophers recognized Newton's supremacy as the natural philosopher who had illuminated the dark clouds of superstition with the light of reason.
Establishing this authority had entailed persistent hard work and subtle manoeuvres on the part of Newton and his allies.
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Ideologically, an intellectual Republic of Letters transcended national boundaries, but, in reality, debates about optics or gravity were inseparable from political, religious and commercial differences. What might appear to be abstract discussions of refractive indices or the meaning of infinity were shot through with local interests, including those of the Venetian glass trade, the Hanoverian court and the Jesuit order.
Within a week, Hooke fired off his first attack on Newton's report, and other critics—both at home and abroad—rapidly followed suit. They were dissatisfied not only with the difficulties of replicating his results, but also with his methodological arguments, and a couple of months later Newton wrote to Oldenburg admitting that he should have given fuller experimental details.
The status of the experiment that he claimed to be crucial continued to be challenged. Should that one single trial override the implications of many others? When competitors announced they could split Newton's supposedly basic rays into ones of different colours, he retorted that if his rivals could not replicate his work, they were using the wrong type of prism.
But how do you define the right sort of prism? Newton seemed to be adopting the unsatisfactory criterion that the right sort of prism was the one that demonstrated he was right [ 11 ]. Prisms now seem unproblematic displayers of nature's truths, but at the time, the status of the prism as a philosophical instrument was contested. Although Hooke managed to confirm some of Newton's findings, Newton's opponents in France produced conflicting experimental results and rival theoretical explanations. Over 30 years later, Newton tried to quell the protracted debates by publishing Opticks , intended partly as a manifesto for British empiricism, which he promoted as a far more reliable route to truth than French hypothesizing.
Producing reconstructed versions of his earlier experiments, he at last provided full specifications of his experimental set-ups and of the prism glass. Desaguliers expressed this cross-Channel antagonism colourfully: Newton continued to maintain that light is a material substance, producing various hypotheses and trying to incorporate wave-like features. Rather than develop those suggestions, during the first half of the eighteenth century his supporters began to make more definitive pronouncements about light's corpuscular nature than he had made in his original article.
This was a period when scientific lecturers and writers—men like Desaguliers—were starting to forge a career as public educators, and they needed a straightforward message to deliver. By visualizing light as a beam of rapidly moving tiny particles, they could provide satisfactory explanations of phenomena such as reflection and refraction. At the same time, a substantial minority of anti-Newtonians, now largely forgotten, insisted that light was some type of divine fluid. For them, the metaphorical resonances of biblical imagery outweighed any materialist interpretation of light as particles [ 13 ].
From mid-century onwards, various wave and vibration theories became increasingly popular amongst pro-Newtonian researchers, who started examining the projectile theory critically rather than simply accepting and propagating it. Newton himself had suggested that the whole universe might be filled with a weightless invisible aether comprising tiny undetectable particles, and this model came to represent orthodox Newtonianism. Despite the demands an aether might seem to place on imagination and credulity, for many people it was preferable to believing that ordinary inert matter could somehow exert a gravitational power stretching out many thousands of miles through empty space: This shift was given additional impetus in , when a London optician demonstrated that even the great Newton could be wrong by inventing an achromatic lens.
Now that their hero had been proved fallible, even critics who described themselves as Newtonians felt less inhibited about modifying his ideas. The credit for confirming the existence of light waves analogous to those of sound is often given to Thomas Young, a polymathic doctor and lecturer at the newly founded Royal Institution in the early nineteenth century.
According to condensed versions of the past, Young performed a crucial experiment by passing a beam of light through two tiny slits in a screen and observing an interference pattern of alternating dark and white stripes, thus showing that light is not particulate but ripples out from a source like waves from stones dropped into a pond. In reality, there was no single specific eureka moment of discovery. Young examined many optical effects, including the rings first studied by Hooke; furthermore, the modern wave theory of optics owes much to the contributions of French experimenters.
Young and his compatriots were unfamiliar with the analytical calculus that had been developed on the continent but was frowned upon in Britain. In the Laplacian research group based just outside Paris, Augustin Fresnel and his colleagues developed important mathematical models to describe the behaviour of light. Newton is now celebrated as a great physicist, but Newton's impact spread across many areas that now seem distinct, and his ideas were discussed as eagerly by artists as by the Fellows of the Royal Society.
For example, the landscape painter John Constable sketched ray diagrams of reflection and refraction in a rain drop, declaring in a lecture at the Royal Institution that his art was a science. Conversely, the significance of Newton's research for the practical problems of mixing colours was first expounded in a book on perspective by the mathematician Brook Taylor.
Constable also pointed to an inherent shortcoming of Newton's analysis: Rainbows with clear stripes appear only in books; in actuality, the hues blend imperceptibly from one to the next as if there were an infinite number of coloured rays. In , the same year that Newton presented his paper to the Royal Society, a leading spokesman at Paris's Royal Academy emphasized that a viable theory of colour was needed in order to rescue art from its contemporary domination by monochromatic drawings. Initially, Newton introduced confusion by suggesting that there are five fundamental or uncompounded colours, and that white light can be reconstituted by combining them together.
They also pointed out that Newton identified green both as a basic colour and as a blue—yellow mixture, and that to say there are five primary colours is to make an arbitrary choice. Searching for a principle of harmony, Newton sought to analyse colours mathematically. By analogy with the musical octave, he developed a colour circle divided into seven unequal segments figure 3.
The arc length of each segment is proportional to its position in the scale, and the radial position Z of a mixed colour indicates how it has been formed. However, Newton never specified exactly what those quantities might represent in terms of light and pigments. Well into the nineteenth century, Newton's colour wheel was elaborated but also contradicted by several authors, who designed a range of complicated circular and pyramidal diagrams.
In nineteenth-century Britain, Newton enjoyed such prestige that adopting the wave theory failed to dent his reputation. It became impossible to oppose Newton outright: For instance, David Brewster was one of Newton's most fervent admirers at the Royal Society, yet he substantially modified Newton's colour theory after examining the prismatic spectrum through glasses of different tints, and announced that there are only three true primary colours: Enormously influential on artists such as J M W Turner, Brewster became notorious for his habit of visiting exhibitions to inspect paintings with his pocket set of coloured glasses before angrily denouncing any errors he perceived.
Europeans were less constrained by patriotism. The most overtly hostile objections came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who flatly rejected Newton's claim that white light is a mixture of coloured rays. Instead, insisted Goethe, colour arises from mixing white light with darkness, its polar opposite, and he showed how coloured fringes can appear at the junction of white and black edges. He also rejected notions of scientific objectivity by incorporating the physiological and emotional responses of an individual observer into the experimental process.
Whereas Newton projected a spectrum on to a wall so that several people could view it simultaneously, Goethe made his own retina the screen by holding the prism directly in front of his eye to experience colours radiating out in different directions. Although dismissed by British scientists, Goethe's ideas were very influential on German science and art during the nineteenth century. Optical theories were continually revised in the centuries following Newton, but the most fundamental shift was introduced by Albert Einstein, who suggested in that light waves are made up from quanta of energy.
Although this novel concept was not accepted for several years, some scientists maintained that photons seemed to vindicate Newton's vision of particulate light rays. However, not only had he prevaricated on that point, he also had no theoretical concept of energy, which was not established in physics until the nineteenth century. Even so, Einstein linked himself to the predecessor he admired so much by providing an adulatory preface for a new edition of Opticks. Writing over a quarter of a millennium after Newton's first paper, Einstein did not point out that in , not even Newton's patrons would have supported this endorsement.
As perceived by his contemporaries, Newton was a brash yet talented newcomer. His radical new theory of light was exciting—but not fully warranted by the experimental descriptions he provided. They would have been astounded to learn that he is now internationally renowned as a scientific genius, a category unknown before the Romantic period. Hall [ 4 ]. Her first academic monograph was Sympathetic Attractions: She later focused on Newton's shifting reputation, and produced her first popular book, Newton: The Making of Genius Since then, she has published widely, including An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment and Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment More recently, her prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History has been translated into nine languages.
Sex, Science and Serendipity , she is currently writing a book on women, science and suffrage in the First World War. In addition to her academic work, she is a regular contributor to popular journals as well as TV and radio programmes such as In our Time. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. The featured article can be viewed at http: Abstract Isaac Newton's reputation was initially established by his paper on the refraction of light through a prism; this is now seen as a ground-breaking account and the foundation of modern optics.
Newton, optics, Descartes, wave theory, refraction. Introduction Isaac Newton's outstanding reputation strongly affects how he is appraised retrospectively. Open in a separate window. Acknowledgements I am grateful for comments by two anonymous referees. Footnotes 1 Blake W. A Letter of Mr. Sent by the Author to the Publisher from Cambridge, Febr. Turnbull H, et al.