Milner

Isaac Milner, A Plan of a Course of Chemical Lectures (Cambridge, 1784)

As President of Queens’ and as Vice Chancellor of the university (1793, 1810) Milner, the ‘declared foe of infidels and Jacobins’, sought to place Newtonian scientific reasoning at the heart of undergraduate education in Cambridge. This, he believed, would weed out those who might use sloppy reasoning to menace the established positions of Church and state. Those unable to meet the demands of such an education were not worthy of distinguished clerical positions. Like others in Cambridge, Milner advocated Newton’s method of analysis in which phenomena are analysed and then reconstituted or synthesised without “feigning hypotheses” of the kind associated with Continental philosophers.

Milner became the inaugural Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy in 1782, a post intended to facilitate ‘discoveries’ in natural philosophy that would ‘tend to set forth the Glory of the Almighty God, and promote the welfare of mankind’. In an age when professorial chairs were frequently regarded as sinecures the Jacksonian chair entailed a clear remit to deliver lectures. In compliance with it Milner gained a reputation as a ‘first rate showman’, delivering lectures each year that alternated between mechanics and chemistry, as prescribed in this ‘Plan of a Course of Chemical Lectures’.