Isaac Newton (26 page)

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes told a few students and fellows in a shadowed room at Trinity College. “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 intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”
⁴¹
The Newton of tradition, the “Sage and Monarch of the Age of Reason,” had to arise later.

(illustration credit 15.2)

He had concealed so much, till the very end. As his health declined, he kept writing. His niece’s new husband, John Conduitt, saw him in his last days working in near darkness on an obsessional history of the world—he wrote at least a dozen drafts—
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended
.
⁴²
He measured the reigns of kings and the generations of Noah, used astronomical calculations to date the sailing of the Argonauts, and declared the ancient kingdoms to be hundreds of years younger than generally supposed. He incorporated his analysis of the Temple of Solomon and said enough about idolatry and the deification of kings to raise suspicion of his heretical beliefs, but he suppressed those one last time.

In his chambers, after a painful fit of gout, he sat with Conduitt before a wood fire and talked about comets. The sun needed constant replenishment, he said. Comets must provide it, feeding the sun like logs thrown on the fire. The comet of 1680 had come close, and it would return. He said that on one approach, perhaps after five or six more orbits, it would fall into the sun and fuel a blaze to consume the very earth, and all its inhabitants would perish in the flames.
⁴³
Yet, Newton said, this was mere conjecture.

He wrote: “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.”
⁴⁴
This sheet of paper, too, he abandoned.

On his deathbed he refused the sacrament of the church. Nor could a pair of doctors ease his pain. He died early Sunday morning, March 19, 1727. On Thursday the Royal Society recorded in its Journal Book, “The Chair being Vacant by the death of Sir Isaac Newton there was no Meeting this Day.”

His recent forebears had used scriveners to draft wills directing the disposition of their meager possessions, principally sheep. When they did not leave such documents, even their names vanished. An early chronicler, researching Newton’s story soon after his death, delved into the Woolsthorpe parish registers of births and burials and found almost nothing: the information “lost, destroyd, or obliterated; for want of care and due preservation.” The national records, he railed, were “the most neglected!… committed to a parish clark, illiterate, that can scarcely write, sottish, or indolent: a task on which the fortunes and emoluments of the whole kingdom in a great measure depends.” In an old town chest, a tattered vellum leaf bore this datum under the heading
baptiz’d anno 1642
: “Isaac sonne of Isaac and Hanna Newton Jan 1.”
⁴⁵

In eighty-four years he had amassed a fortune: household furniture, much of it upholstered in crimson; crimson curtains, a crimson mohair bed, and crimson cushions; a clock; a parcel of mathematical instruments and chemical glasses; several bottles of wine and cider; thirty-nine silver medals and copies in plaster of Paris; a vast library with nearly two thousand books and his many secret manuscripts; gold bars and coins—the whole estate valued at £31,821,
⁴⁶
a considerable legacy.

Yet he left no will.

Notes

A word about dates. In the time with which we are concerned, the English calendar ran at first ten and then eleven days behind the calendar in most of Europe. I use the English dates. Meanwhile, the year in England was considered to start March 25, not January 1. So, for example, when Newton died on March 20, they reckoned it was 1726 in England but 1727 elsewhere. From our anachronistic point of view, it was 1727, so I use the Continental—modern—years.

A word about language. Mostly I follow the spelling and style of the original texts. But where Newton (and others) compressed words to “y
^e
,” “w
^ch
,” “y
^t
,” &c., I have modernized the orthography for the sake of readability.

EPIGRAPH Newton’s recollection, the year before he died, of having made the first reflecting telescope; recorded by his niece’s husband, John Conduitt, memorandum, August 31, 1726, Keynes MS 130.10.

1.
“What a lesson to the vanity and presumption of philosophers!” exclaimed his first biographer, Brewster, in 1831 (
The Life of Sir Isaac Newton
, p. 303). Newton, who read incessantly and remained unsettled, was echoing Milton (
Paradise Regained
, 320–21):

   Who reads

Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

A spirit and judgment equal or superior,

(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)

Uncertain and unsettled still remains,

Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself,

Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys

And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,

As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

2
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 34.

3
. Having compared them as lovers, Voltaire added judiciously, “One can admire Newton for that, but must not blame Descartes.”
Letters on England
, 14, pp. 68–70.

4
. Nor did he persuade us quickly. A few years before his death, a scholarly author could rail against Newton’s conception of gravity (“this Cause, which looks as monstrous as any of the Fictions of Antiquity”) without condescending to use the word: “That it is a Virtue or Power which Bodies have to attract or draw one another; that every Particle of Matter has this Power or Virtue; that it reaches to all Places at all Distances, and penetrates to the Center of the Sun and Planets; that it acts not upon the Surfaces of Bodies as other Natural Agents, but upon their whole Substance or solid Content, &c. and if so, what a strange Thing must it be.” Gordon,
Remarks
, p. 6.

5
. Hermann Bondi, “Newton and the Twentieth Century—A Personal View,” in Fauvel et al.,
Let Newton Be!
, p. 241.

6
.
Principia
(Motte), p. 6.

7
. As Einstein himself knew well. Hermann Bondi commented: “When I talk on special relativity, I always say that Einstein’s contribution has a name for being difficult, but this is quite wrong. Einstein’s contribution is very easy to understand, but unfortunately it rests on the theories of Galileo and Newton which are very difficult to understand!” “Newton and the Twentieth Century—A Personal View,” in Fauvel et al.,
Let Newton Be!
, p. 245.

8
. Opticks, Foreword, p. lix.

1: WHAT IMPLOYMENT IS HE FIT FOR?

1
. Barnabas Smith was sixty-three and well off; Hannah Ayscough probably about thirty; their marriage was negotiated by one of the rector’s parishioners, for a fee, and by her brother. It was agreed that Isaac would remain at Woolsthorpe and that Smith would give him a parcel of land. She brought to the marriage a parcel with an income of £50.

2
. One skirmish broke out near Grantham on May 13, 1643; fighting continued sporadically nearby through the summer and occasionally during the rest of the decade.

3
. Cf. Clay,
Economic Expansion and Social Change
, pp. 8–9.

4
. Merchants were expected to “have knowledge and cunning in reading and writing” as well as “the knowledge and feate of Arithmetike,” if not with pen then with counters on a board. Hugh Oldcastle,
A Briefe Introduction and Maner how to keepe Bookes of Accompts
(1588), quoted in Thomas, “Numeracy in Modern England,” p. 106.

5
. When he was twenty, a student at Trinity College, he suffered a sort of crisis of conscience around Whitsunday and wrote down—in a private shorthand—a catalogue of his sins. Among the early sins he included “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them” and “Wishing death and hoping it to some.” He also recalled “peevishness” with his mother and half-sister, striking his sister and others, “having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese,” and many episodes of lying and violating the Sabbath (“Thy day”). Westfall, “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience,” p. 10.

6
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 43: “He showd another method of indulging his curiosity to find out the sun’s motion, by making dyals of divers forms and constructions every where about the house, in his own chamber, in the entrys and rooms where ever the sun came.”

7
. The analemma.

8
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 43 “and made a sort of almanac of these lines, knowing the day of the month by them, and the suns entry into signs, the equinoxes and solstices. So that Isaacs dyals, when the sun shined, were the common guide of the family and neighborhood.”.

9
.
Henry VI
, Part 3, II.v.21.

10
. Eventually he wrote:

“It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover and effectually to distinguish the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent, because the parts of that immovable space in which those motions are performed do by no means come under the observation of our senses. Yet the thing is not altogether desperate; for we have some arguments to guide us, partly from the apparent motions, which are the differences of the true motions; partly from the forces, which are the causes and effects of the true motions. For instance, if two globes, kept at a given distance one from the other by means of a cord that connects them, were revolved about their common center of gravity, we might, from the tension of the cord, discover the endeavor of the globes to recede from the axis of their motion, and from thence we might compute the quantity of their circular motions.…”
Principia
(Motte), p. 12.

11
. Couth, ed.,
Grantham during the Interregnum, 1641–1649
.

12
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 43. Other, presumably Newtonian, crude diagramming has been uncovered. Whiteside (“Isaac Newton: Birth of a Mathematician,” p. 56) assessed them coolly: “It would need the blindness of maternal love to read into these sets of intersecting circles and scrawled line-figures either burgeoning artistic prowess or mathematical precocity.”

13
. It was long thought that Newton had no mathematical training as a schoolboy, but Stokes’s own notebook, “Notes for the Mathematicks,” exists in the Grantham Museum (D/N 2267). Whiteside, “Newton the Mathematician,” in Bechler,
Contemporary Newtonian Research
, p. 111. For acres cf. Petty,
Political Arithmetick
, and John Worlidge,
Systema Agriculturæ
(London: Dorling, 1687).

14
. Quoted in Manuel,
Portrait
, pp. 57–58. The “Latin Exercise Book,” originally among the papers of the Portsmouth Collection, is in private hands. Manuel adds: “There is an astonishing absence of positive feeling. The word
love
never appears, and expressions of gladness and desire are rare. A liking for roast meat is the only strong sensuous passion.”

15
. Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy
, p. 14.

16
. More fully: “Though there were many Giants of old in Physick and Philosophy, yet I say with Didacus Stella: A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a Giant may see farther than the Giant himself; I may likely add, alter, and see farther than my predecessors.” This is neither the beginning nor the end of the story of this aphorism. For that, one must read Merton,
On the Shoulders of Giants
.