Treatise on Natural Philosophy

The first volume was received by an enthusiastic review in Saturday Review:

The grand result of all concurrent research in modern times has been to confirm what was but perhaps a dream of genius, or an instinct of the keen Greek intellect, that all the operations of nature are rooted and grounded in number and figure.[2]

The Treatise was also reviewed as Elements of Natural Philosophy (1873).[3]

Thomson & Tait's Treatise on Natural Philosophy was reviewed by J. C. Maxwell in Nature of 3 July 1879 indicating the importance given to kinematics: "The guiding idea … is that geometry itself is part of the science of motion."[4]

In 1892 Karl Pearson noted that ${\displaystyle T}$ and ${\displaystyle T^{1}}$ perpetuated a "subjectivity of force" that originated with Newton.[5]

In 1902 Alexander Macfarlane ascribed much of the inspiration of the book to William Rankine's 1865 paper "Outlines of the Science of Energetics":

The main object of Thomson and Tait's Treatise on Natural Philosophy was to fill up Rankine's outlines, — expound all branches of physics from the standpoint of the doctrine of energy. The plan contemplated four volumes; the printing of the first volume began in 1862 and was completed in 1867. The other three volumes never appeared. When a second edition was called for, the matter of the first volume was increased by a number of appendices and appeared as two separately bound parts. The volume which did appear, although judged rather difficult reading even by accomplished mathematicians, has achieved great success. It has been translated in French and German; it has educated the new generation of mathematical physicists; and it has been styled the "Principia" of the nineteenth century.[1]^:42

In 1851 Arthur Schopenhauer derided ${\displaystyle T}$ and ${\displaystyle T^{1}}$as a "splendid example of":

Thoughts put into forced and involved language, creat[ing] new words and prolix periods which go round the thought and cover it up. They hesitate between the two attempts of communicating the thought and of concealing it. They want to make it look grand so that it has the appearance of being learned and profound, thereby giving one the idea that there is much more in it than one perceives at the moment. Accordingly, they sometimes put down their thoughts in bits, in short, equivocal, and paradoxical sentences which appear to mean much more than they say. [6]

• Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867) from Hathi Trust.
• Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1879) on Google books
• Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1879) at Internet Archive