1. Roger Cotes, “Cotes’ Preface to the Second Edition,” in Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (1729), ed. Florian Cajoli (1934), vol. 1: The Motion of Bodies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), xx.
2. Recently, Leah Orr has challenged the attribution of Love-Letters. In the absence of more consistent logic and other scholarship, I have chosen to follow the established practice of scholars in the field and treat Love-Letters as Behn’s. Even if Love-Letters is not Behn’s, this chapter shows that its handling of the self is consistent with Behn’s interest in natural philosophy expressed in her narrative fiction, poetry, drama, and translations, and supports my larger argument that authors of the period found the idea of the stable, unified self profoundly and increasingly problematic as political events unfolded. Leah Orr, “Attribution Problems in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” The Modern Language Review 108, no. 1 (January 2013): 30–51,
http://www.jstor.org
/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.108.1.0030.
3. A sampling of scholarship examining Behn’s familiarity with natural philosophy includes Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 209–227;
4. Sarah Goodfellow, “‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 229–250;
5. Line Cottegnies, “The Translator as Critic: Aphra Behn’s Translation of Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds (1688),” Restoration 27, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 23–38;