Letter 1402

Greene discusses mathematics. He is particularly concerned with the quadrature of curves, which Newton was working on at this time. Robert Greene was a natural philosopher who sided with the Tories after the Glorious Revolution (1688). He went on to write anti-materialist works against Newtonian mechanical philosophy, principally in ‘The Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces’ (1727) (John Gascoigne, Greene, Robert (c.16781730), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11419, accessed 4 July 2013]).