Mutis's Quotes On Religion

As Mutis presents it, the relationship between mathematics and theology follows a tradition coming from Newton’s mathematical study of nature in the seventeenth century. For Mutis, by using mathematics, Newton discovered and explained the laws of motion created by God. In this sense, for Mutis, studying natural phenomena entails the possibility of reducing them to some mathematical laws which, in the end, lead the men to knowing God. Mutis supports this conclusion on the assumption that God has created a set of laws which can be expressed in mathematical terms, and on the idea that these laws rule the behavior of measurable bodies. As he claims: ‘When God created the world, this wonderful machine, which we would not admire enough, it seem that
For instance, we can find there the mechanical metaphor of a machine-like universe. By considering Mutis’ educational context, as I have characterized it in the last chapter, we can assume that he is dealing with different currents of mechanics, encompassing Cartesianism, Gassendi’s atomism, and Newton’s physics. We can conclude, therefore, that Mutis’ conception of what the natural philosophy was strongly informed by Newton’s mathematization of nature, but that his conception of the universe was the result of an eclectic tradition where incompatible currents converged. I have explained in the last chapter that it was caused by the desperate attempts during the 1740s to refuse the scholastic tradition promoted in the Spanish universities in the context of emergence of the Spanish military and naval academies. Finally, it is also interesting to point out that in the passage Mutis assumes a decaying conception of the universe, by postulating that the mutual interaction of the bodies in the universe shall ‘ruin necessarily’ the machine-like universe. A feature which is usually related to Newtonianism and that came to be one of the central issues in the debates regarding its reception in Europe since the early-eighteenth century. It means that Mutis was not only aware of Newton’s theories as they are presented in his published works,
In the case of logic, he argues that the mathematical method of analysis and synthesis is a way to use the principles of logic in order to demonstrate the certainty of a proposition. Accordingly, for him, when mathematics is applied to logic it should be considered as an instrument for training the mind in order to proceed demonstratively from particular propositions to the discovery of general ones. Yet, it should be highlighted that this is the particular application of mathematics to the field of logic as it is used for the demonstrations of general conclusions. In this sense, when historians like Arboleda, Mauricio Nieto-Olarte, and Regino Martínez-Chavanz argue that, for Mutis, mathematics is only used as an external frame of thought, they are assuming that the application of mathematics is reduced to the field of logic. I shall argue in the next chapter that this idea is founded on the ignorance of the manuscript sources, where we can see clearly that by teaching Newton’s mathematical principles applied to the study of the motion of bodies in conic sections, Mutis also uses mathematics as a source of explanation of natural phenomena.
However, the particular point where Mutis makes a more judicious analysis of the influence of mathematics in other disciplines is in the relationship he postulates between mathematics and physics, because that