Descartes' laws, according to Henry, were envisioned within the context of his mechanistic philosophy in order to stipulate and explain the interactions of moving material particles.Ĭrombie (1959) made the mathematical claim concerning the origin of the concept of law of nature. Henry too stressed the link between natural laws and the mechanistic conception of nature. Milton added his share to the voluntarist thesis by stressing that Ockham developed a philosophy which included both a complete rejection of the metaphysical realism maintained by Aristotle and an exceptionally strong emphasis on the absolute freedom and omnipotence of God, especially in relation to the work of creation.

Oakley found the historical moment at which the conception of imposed laws was introduced in William of Ockham (1288–c.1348) and the voluntarists of the fourteenth century. If, by contrast, an extrinsic system of laws is held, an empiricist leaning is inevitable. If an immanent natural order is assumed, one can penetrate the essences and ‘natures’ of things and whence deduce why and how they act as they do. It argues for a sharp dichotomy between views of natural law as immanent in the world, and the view, characteristic of the seventeenth century, that the laws of nature were imposed upon the world from without by the decree of the omnipotent God. This thesis stresses the link between the notion of external laws imposed from without and the conception of a mechanistic universe. The theological-mechanistic position was held by Zilsel, 1942, Needham, 1956, Needham, 1969, Oakley, 1961a, Milton, 1981 and Henry (2004). There are three principal claims concerning the historical and conceptual origins of the idea of law of nature in the seventeenth century. Historians and philosophers of science regard the concept of law constitutive of the structure and premises of early modern science. Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Galileo's law of falling bodies, Descartes' laws of motion, Boyle's law of gases, and Newton's gravitational, inverse-square law are considered hallmarks of the scientific revolution. Ever since the seventeenth century the concept of law of nature has become an essential element of modern scientific knowledge.

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