NEWTON, ISAAC

NEWTON, ISAAC (1642–1727), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of all time. Born prematurely (at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England), Newton developed into a physically weak, lonely, unhappy child; he was also an indifferent student until an encounter with a school bully roused him to excel. In 1661, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he showed no distinction until he came under the influence of Isaac Barrow, a professor of mathematics. A man of great insight, Barrow was the first to recognize Newton's genius; in fact, he resigned his professorship so that Newton, at age twenty-six, could be appointed to it.

Shortly after Newton graduated in 1665, the university was closed because of plague, and he had to return to Woolsthorpe. There he spent eighteen months in studies that laid the foundation for much of his later work. He discovered the binomial theorem, differential and integral calculus, the theory of color, several other important theorems in mathematics, and the celebrated law of gravitation—which for nearly 250 years was regarded as the epitome and exemplar of scientific laws of nature.

Newton's interests were both mathematical and experimental. He invented a reflecting telescope to free telescopes from the chromatic aberration of refracting lenses. He presented a small version of his telescope to the Royal Society, which honored him by electing him a fellow when he was only thirty. In 1672, when Newton published his new theory of light and color—including the experiments showing that white light can be separated into its component colors by a prism—the society was bombarded with letters disputing his conclusions. Some of the correspondents were scientists of note, among them Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens. The controversy affected Newton greatly and, thereafter, he tended to withdraw from the public eye. Though he had vowed after the controversy not to publish any further discoveries, he did, in fact, continue to publish.

Newton conceived a proprietary interest in every subject he investigated; there was hardly any achievement of his creative scientific life that was unaccompanied by acrimony and quarreling. This was largely owing to a great deal of paranoia and self-doubt in Newton's personality. His ego needed to be continually bolstered by the praise and admiration of others, a trait that may have had its cause in Newton's humble origins—his father was a yeoman, a fact that always made Newton uneasy and that he tried to obscure by inventing grandiose genealogies for himself.

In 1684, Newton received a visit from the astronomer Edmond Halley, who consulted him about some mathematical points concerning gravitational attraction (Halley and Hooke had been working on this problem for some time). To Halley's great surprise, Newton replied that he had already made these calculations many years earlier, but that he could not find the appropriate papers. Halley urged Newton to recalculate, using his original theorems, and to prepare a manuscript for the Royal Society. Halley showed enormous tact and good judgment in not letting Hooke's claim to the inverse-square law of gravitation and the attendant acrimony between Hooke and Newton vitiate the whole project. Financed by moneys from Halley's personal funds, Newton's work was finally published in 1687 under the title Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica.

Newton's Principia, as it has come to be known, is justifiably regarded as the greatest scientific work ever produced. It integrated into one coherent whole diverse data and mathematical principles concerning the motion of material particles and gravitation. As the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1543 marked the beginning of the great scientific revolution, the publication of the Principia marked its completion and the beginning of the modern scientific age.

Indeed, Newton is often described as the inaugurator of the "age of reason." Alexander Pope hailed him thus:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, let Newton be! and all was light.

And many were other accolades from philosophers, theologians, and poets, although few of them ever read the Principia or had the mathematical ability to comprehend it, as the philosopher John Locke confessed about himself. For his own and the immediately succeeding generation, Newton epitomized reason, sound judgment, and even saintly goodness. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century, poets like Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats had vilified Newton, identifying him—and the science that he had helped create—with the forces of mechanization that were despiritualizing the cosmos. Blake, for example, regarded Newton, along with Locke and Francis Bacon, as a member of an "infernal trinity" that had a satanic influence on "Albion," by which Blake meant unspoiled England, or archetypal man.

In 1693, Newton suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. He had represented the university as a member of Parliament since 1689, and he had devotedly attended to his mother during her final illness, and these responsibilities must have weighed on him. After his recovery, he resumed his life in London, where he became warden and later master of the Royal Mint. In 1703 he became president of the Royal Society, a post he used, often unscrupulously, in his various and many feuds, including one with G. W. Leibniz over the question as to which of them had first discovered differential calculus. He published his Opticks, written in a very different style from the Principia, in 1704; it was actually read not only by his scientific colleagues but also by other intellectuals. He was knighted in 1705. Shortly before his death, he removed to the country air of the village of Kensington. He died there in 1727, without having requested last rites. He was buried alongside kings and princes in Westminster Abbey.

Throughout his life—and by no means only during his nervous breakdown, as some have maintained—Newton was highly interested in theological, chronological, and alchemical studies. It is estimated that he wrote some two million words on these subjects, a total far surpassing that of his writings in mathematics and physics. Much of this material, particularly that on alchemy, consists of the writings of others that Newton copied for his own use, but he also wrote books of his own on these subjects. It may even be true, as Newton himself seems to have hinted, that his real interest lay in a wide and comprehensive knowledge that he hoped to acquire through alchemy and theology, and that he viewed his scientific studies only as amusing diversions. Since he could not, in general, be accused of excessive humility, we may have to understand in another light a well-known remark he made toward the end of his life: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Newton certainly believed in the prisca sapienta, an ancient wisdom that had existed among priest-scientists such as the Chaldeans in Babylonia, the brahmans in India, and Moses and Pythagoras among the Hebrews and the Greeks. He believed that this wisdom was now largely lost, that he, Newton, was one of an esoteric brotherhood extending back to ancient times, and that he was redisclosing this knowledge in a new form, more mathematical than metaphysical or mythological. "Newton was not the first of the age of reason," the economist John Maynard Keynes concluded after examining Newton's alchemical papers. "He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and the intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."

Newton was a staunch monotheist and strongly antitrinitarian. Perhaps owing to this, he never took holy orders and could not become the master of Trinity College. His antitrinitarian sentiment, however, was a dreadful secret that Newton tried desperately all his life to conceal. He himself often maintained the philosophical autonomy of nature and revelation, but for himself he certainly regarded his work in natural philosophy to be a gloria and a study of God's works. Future generations, in denigrating religion and exiling God from natural philosophy, were more influenced by the science and its mechanistic implications, a science of which he was the supreme representative and symbol, than by Newton's own example or beliefs. This trend would have horrified Newton, who felt an emotional, personal relationship with God. In fact, Newton himself would have wished to be regarded as a prophet of God.

See Also

Alchemy, article on Renaissance Alchemy; Rosicrucians.

Bibliography

The standard biography of Newton is Louis Trenchard More's Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York, 1934). A short, popular account is given by E. N. Andrade in his Sir Isaac Newton (New York, 1954). A more recent, reliable biography is Richard S. Westfall's Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980). A fascinating study of the psychology of this complex genius is Frank E. Manuel's A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1968). For Newton's chronological, religious, and alchemical interests and studies, the following three books, respectively, are indispensable: Isaac Newton: Historian (Cambridge, Mass., 1963) and The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), both by Frank E. Manuel, and The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, or "The Hunting of the Greene Lyon" (Cambridge, 1975) by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. A good and representative selection of Newton's writings concerning his philosophy of nature and natural theology is to be found in Newton's Philosophy of Nature, edited, arranged, and annotated by H. S. Thayer (New York, 1953).

New Sources

Aughton, Peter. Newton's Apple: Issac Newton and the English Scientific Renaissance. London, 2003.

English, John C. "John Hutchinson's Critique of Newtonian Heterodoxy," Church History 68/3 (1999): 581–597.

Lincoln, Bruce. "Issac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History and the Relative Prestige of Peoples," History of Religions 42/1 (2002): 1–18.

Newton and Religion. Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1999.

Pfizenmaier, Thomas C. "Was Issac Newton an Arian?" Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 57–80.

Ravi Ravindra (1987)

Revised Bibliography