The prominent Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather published The Christian Philosopher in 1721, eight years after he had been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. The first comprehensive book on science written by an American, it was intended to demonstrate the harmony between science and religion. Mather surveyed all the known sciences from astronomy and physics to human anatomy. He presented evidence that both celestial and terrestrial phenomena imply an intelligent designer. Winton Solberg's introduction places Mather's treatise in its widest historical context. In addition to tracing the origins and sources of Mather's work, Solberg analyzes the book's contents, its reception, and its significance in American intellectual and cultural history. This edition returns Mather to his rightful place in American thought, as a deeply religious intellectual whose warm reception of the new science helped bridge the gap between the medieval worldview and the scientific revolution of Copernicus and Newton.

From The Christian Philosopher

Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks. Schoolcraft's Ozark Journal 1818-1819

A enigmatic figure from a twelfth-century SpanishArabic Islamic philosophical romance, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, makes an even more enigmatic appearance, circa 1700, in the introduction to Cotton Mather’s The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature with Religious Improvements. While we hardly expect the notorious prosecutor of witches to write favorably—in even the remotest corner of Mather’s “egocentric universe” (Parrington 107)—of a literary symbol from what he viewed as an infidel culture, at least a few special readers from the New England Company and the Royal Society would have been familiar with Ibn Tufayl’s (1110–1185) masterpiece, The Tale of Hayy Ibn Yaqdan and as surprised as we are to find Mather alluding to it admiringly as a model for his ideal Christian philosopher.1 Appropriating a literary gem written by an Islamic philosopher from Medieval Andalusia for a late seventeenth-century transatlantic readership, Mather prepares that unique reader for an unusual line of development by giving the Islamic masterpiece primary rhetorical position at the very head of his Christian Philosopher, a work he hoped would stand as his opus magnum and as the final word on New World natural science.2 That a unique Medieval Islamic literary figure is made to serve as a threshold to the seventeenth-century New England Puritan’s New World “summa” of natural science is strong evidence not only of the epistemological complexity of Mather’s New England at the turn

Jr. Doyle R. Quiggle

Papers

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqdan in New England: A Spanish-Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather's Christian Philosopher?