The Folly of Atheism. A Sermon Preached at St. Martin s in the Fields, March the 7th 1691/2. Being the First of the Lecture Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esquire. 4th edition, 1693 [bound with] Matter and Motion cannot Think: Or a Confutation of Atheism from the Faculties of the Soul. Second Lecture, 3rd edition, 1694 [bound with] A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure of Human Bodies. Parts I, II and III (Third/Fourth/Fifth Lectures), 3rd edition, 1694 [bound with] A Confutation of Atheism from the Origine and Frame of the World. (Sixth/Seventh/Eighth Lectures), Part I (2nd edition, 1694) , Part II (1st edition, 1693), Part III (1st edition, 1693).

BENTLEY, Richard

About this Item

All eight of Bentley's Boyle Lectures, in a mixture of first, second, third and fourth editions, all published by H. Mortlock in London. Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was a protégé of Isaac Newton and eventually became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1892, A.E. Housman called him 'the greatest scholar that England, or perhaps that Europe, ever bred'. Bentley was nominated to give the first series of lectures or sermons endowed by Robert Boyle under the terms of his will, to consider the relationship between Christianity and the new natural philosophy. 'Although the lectures were largely devoted to a conventional defence of the existence of God, the series culminated in an exposition of Newton's natural philosophy designed to explicate the theological position outlined in the earlier lectures and they are thus the first popular presentation of the discoveries otherwise inaccessibly presented in Newton's Principia of 1687. The letters that Bentley and Newton exchanged before the publication of the lectures show Newton clarifying his position: in particular he is anxious to emphasize that gravity depends on the constant presence of an agent and that Newtonian cosmology is not intended to justify a self-sustaining universe' (Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers, Thoemmes Press, 2000). PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: 8 parts in one volume, small 4to, [iv], 36, 34 [misnumbered 33], 32, 36, 35, [1], [ii], 34, 40, 42 pp., with a long contemporary annotation on p 32 of the final part, twentieth-century quarter calf, first title-page stained and dusty, the other seven clean and white, occasional pencil stripes in the margins, generally good clean copies. Seller Inventory # ABE-1642171582105

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Folly of Atheism. A Sermon Preached at ...

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good