Greene,
Robert (c.1678–1730), natural
philosopher, the son of Robert Greene, a mercer of Tamworth,
Staffordshire, and his wife, Mary Pretty of Fazeley, was educated at Clare
College, Cambridge, to which he was admitted as a sizar on 8 October 1694. He
graduated BA in 1700, MA in 1703, and DD in 1728. Having been awarded a
fellowship by the college in 1703 and ordained in London in 1705, Greene
thereafter devoted his life to teaching and writing in defence of the Christian
religion and of what he considered a form of natural philosophy that was not
antagonistic to true religion. His conscientiousness, if not his effectiveness,
as a tutor is evident in the formidable curriculum outlined in his pamphlet Encyclopaedia, or, A Method of Instructing Pupils (1707).
Though a student of Richard Laughton, the famed pro-Newtonian ‘pupil-monger’,
Greene adopted very different political, scientific, and religious views from
the whig, latitudinarian Laughton. At a time when the university was deeply
divided in its response to the changes wrought by the revolution of 1688,
Greene sided with the tories. Such a political stance is evident in his fulsome
dedication of The Principles of Natural Philosophy
(1712) to Robert Harley as one ‘Rais'd by the Providence of Almighty God for
the Support and Patronage of our most Holy Faith’. Greene's theological
position was consistent with his political attachment to the tory party as a
protector of the established church: the goal of this work, as of its
predecessor, A Demonstration of the Truth and Divinity of
the Christian Religion (1711), was to undermine the claims of those
theologians who down-played the role of the church as an interpreter of
revelation by focusing on forms of natural religion that could be arrived at
through the use of reason. As he wrote in A Demonstration,
‘Reason has usurp'd by its Artifice and Cunning, and its subtle and
plausible insinuations, an unwarrantable Power and Authority’ (p. 188).
Similarly in the preface to The Principles he decried
the influence of ‘those Divines in our present Age, who are too fond of what
they call Rational, who put too great a stress upon their reasonings from
Nature’.
For Greene the defence of revealed religion involved the developing of an
alternative system of natural philosophy to put in the place of the dominant
mechanical philosophy, which he viewed as promoting materialism. Though
respectful of Isaac Newton personally, he feared that his work, too, could lend
aid to the rationalists and materialists. For, as he wrote in the preface to
his third and most encyclopaedic major work, The Principles
of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces (1727), the
Newtonian system was ‘much the same [as the Cartesian] as to the Principles of
a Similar and Homogeneous Matter’. Hence Greene sought to replace it with what
he termed a ‘truly English, a Cantabrigian, and a Clarensian one … I shall
venture to call the Greenian’ (p. iv). As its title suggests, the aim of this
work was to argue that matter could be resolved into a range of forces, thus
reinforcing Greene's basic contention that matter was neither passive nor
homogeneous as the mechanists and materialists maintained. Greene carried
further the intent of his previous book ‘wherein’, as Roger Cotes reported to
Newton before it was published, ‘I am informed he undertakes to overthrow the
Principles of your Philosophy’ (Turnbull, 5.166). However, along with Newton,
Greene dismissed John Locke, arguing that his empiricist theory of the mind
favoured the materialists and reduced mankind to ‘no Degree above an Oyster,
unless that he has more senses’ (Philosophy of … Forces,
628).
Greene served as vicar of Everton, Bedfordshire, and
Tetworth, Huntingdonshire, from 1723, but his central focus remained the
university, where he served as proctor in 1727. He died on 16 August 1730 while
on a visit to his birthplace. He left an elaborate will, the provisions of
which confirmed his reputation for eccentricity—among its more bizarre
stipulations was that his body should be dissected and the skeleton hung in the
library of King's College, Cambridge. Greene also wanted monuments to his
memory to be placed in the chapels of Clare College and King's College, in the
university church, and at Tamworth. It appears that none of his wishes was
complied with and ultimately, most of his estate went to Clare College.
John Gascoigne
will
of Robert Greene, Clare College, Cambridge, Archives · will, Notts. Arch. · GM, 1st ser., 53 (1783), 657 [will] · GM, 1st ser., 61 (1791), 725 · [M. D. Forbes],
ed., Clare College, 1326–1926, 2 vols. (1928–30) · The correspondence
of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull and others, 7 vols. (1959–77) · C.
Middleton, letter to Harley, 6 Sept 1730, BL, Loan
29/167 · Venn, Alum. Cant. · DNB
house
at Tamworth plus £200 bank stock to Clare College: will, Notts. Arch.; Clare
College, Cambridge
© Oxford
University Press 2004–5 |
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John Gascoigne, ‘Greene,
Robert (c.1678–1730)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11419, accessed 19 Nov 2005] Robert Greene (c.1678–1730):
doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11419 |
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