Genius found in quart pot
Anthony Storr
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton Richard S. Westfall (Cambridge University Press pp.908, £25) Isaac Newton is generally acknowledged to have been one of the greatest creative men of genius who have ever existed. It also happens that he exhibited striking abnormalities of personality, and at one time was considered mad by his contemporaries. This new biography, by a professor of the history of science at Indiana university, is a massive, scrupulous piece of research which has occupied the author for 20 years. His aim has been to present Newton primarily as a scientist; so that a great deal of space is devoted to explaining the exact nature of Newton's discoveries, the assumptions of 17th-century science from which Newton began, and the apparatus which Newton used in his experiments, most of which was devised by himself.
Westfall's emphasis is, therefore, quite, different from that of Frank Manuel, the historian whose A Portrait of Isaac Newton I published, in 1969, was chiefly concerned with Newton as a man. To my mind, the two books complement each other. Westfall's book is clearly going to become the standard work of reference on Newton, but may be found indigestible by those who are more interested in Newton's personality than in science. Manuel's book is not displaced, but Westfall's cautious disinclination to speculate beyond the evidence is a valuable corrective to some of Manuel's wilder psycho-analytic interpretations. Both authors would, however, agree that Newton's peculiar childhood experience had a profound effect in shaping his withdrawn, solitary, suspicious adult character. Neither, to my mind, entirely succeeds in relating the peculiarities of his personality to his creativity; but this may be asking the impossible. Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day, 1642,He was so tiny that he could be put into a quart pot, and his life hung in the balance for a week. His father, a yeoman without education, unable even to sign his name, had died three months before Isaac Newton was born. For his first three years, Newton enjoyed the undivided attention of his mother without suffering competition from any rival. Indeed, since he was premature, he may have had even more attention than most babies require. Then, on Christmas Day,1646, when Newton was just past his third birthday, his mother remarried. She not only presented Newton with an unwanted stepfather, but added insult to injury by abandoning him, leaving him to be reared by his maternal grand mother under the legal guardianship of an uncle. Newton never forgave her; nor does he ever seem to have been on friendly terms with his stepfather. Although he dutifully cared for his mother during her terminal illness in 1679, Westfall records that he paid her remarkably few visits during the time he was at Cambridge, which was not far from his native Lincolnshire. A lonely boys he, was unpopular at school, and was described by a contemporary as, 'A sober, silent, thinking lad [and] never was known scarce to play with the boys abroad.' Like Iraq isolates, Newton made himself disliked by his actual and assumed superiority, and' throughout his life, seems never to have been able to handle disagreement with 1115 views with equanimity or tolerance. westfall has thoroughly documented what is known of Newton's boyhood aggressiveness and disobedience, and says that he must have been insufferable. He has Ms° examined the kind of curriculum which must have been offered Newton at Grantham Grammar School to which Newton went when he was 12. It is indeed almost incredible that 'the man who would discover the calculus four years after he left grammar school was probably not even introduced there to the already thriving mathematical culture out of which the calculus would come.' Newton was an autodidact whose achievements in mastering difficult subjects on his own have probably never been rivalled. It is small wonder that Westfall writes of him: 'He has become for me wholly other, one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings.' In June 1661, when he was 18, Newton was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge tie remained there for 35 years, successivelY being elected Scholar, minor Fellow, major, Fellow, and, at 27, Lucasian Professor or Mathematics. Newton was reluctant to take Holy Orders, a step usually demanded of Fellows of Colleges, and had to obtain a special dispensation from Charles H to excuse him from ordination. We know that Newton was an Arian, who did not ace* the doctrine of the Trinity. He believed that, worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, agar ,that Athanasius , whose fourth century rout ni Arius in that famous controversy between_ Homoousians and Homoiousians amused Gibbon, had corruptly distorted the early texts of the Christian Fathers. Pis Westfall points out, this heretical opinions may have been the reason for NeWt011 reluctance to be ordained on this occasion, but did not prevent him from professing Orthodoxy on subsequent occasions when it was required of him. The foundations of Newton's main discoveries were laid in the biennium rnirabde 1664-66, between the ages of 21 and 23. This Is characteristic of great innovators in physics and mathematics. Writers, painters and novelists continue to produce new work into old age; and whilst mathematicians and Physicists are often productive in their middle years, it is usually the case that their later work is an elaboration of insights reached when they were still in their twenties. During those two years, Newton formulated his basic laws of mechanics, and hIS Optical observations on the nature of light, the calculus, and the law of universal gravitation. He himself recalled that 'in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematics and Philosophy more than at any time since., In fact, Newton was the archetypal s.ehelarly recluse, studying almost continually, often forgetting to eat, and engagMg very little in any social life. He was always reluctant to publish, and it was not until 1687 that his greatest work, the Principia Mathematica, saw the light of day. Newton was a master of generalisation, but his discoveries, unlike the speculations of many generalisers, had to be supported by i mathematical proofs. His leap of the magination, which combined the discoveries Of Kepler and Galileo in such a way that the motions of bodies upon earth and the motions of bodies in the heavens could be seen to obey the same universal laws, has been described as the greatest generalisation achieved by the human mind: but it was his outstanding ability at mathematics Which enabled him to render his imaginative insight scientifically credible. In 1693, Newton went through a period of mental turmoil, preceded, as is often the case In such episodes, by insomnia and anorexia. In September of that year he wrote to Pepys saying, 'I am extremely• troubled at the embroilment I am in, and have neither ate nor slept well this 12 month, nor have my former consistency of mind.' He added that he must withdraw from pepys's acquaintance and from seeing bis other friends. In the same month he wrote to Locke, the philosopher, saying that he apologised to him for 'uncharitableness.' 'Being of opinion that you end eavoured to embroil me with woemen and by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live I answered 'twere better You were dead.' In psychiatric terms, Newtons illness seems to have been a depression, accompanied, as mid-life depressions often are, by transient paranoid delusions. The latter seems to have been no .mote than an exaggeration of Newton's habitual distrust of others, which may, I el:insider rightly, be assumed to spring from his early betrayal by his mother. Various precipitating causes have been suggested. Milo Keynes published an article in the Lancet drawing attention to the fact that Newton's hair had been found to contain excess amounts of mercury and lead (Spargo & Pounds 1979) and suggests that Newton's illness was the result of poisoning by mercury, contracted from his chemical experiments. Westfall rejects this hypothesis on the grounds that other symptoms of mercury poisoning seem to be absent and that Newton's recovery was probably too quick for his illness to be accounted for in this way. Whether or not his illness was precipitated by a physical cause is not relevant to the content of his delusional ideas, which reflect his inner preoccupations in the same way that Evelyn Waugh's inner preoccupations were released by drugs (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold).
Another Possibility is that the balance of his mind was disturbed by the abrupt termination of his relationship with Fatio de Duillier, a young Swiss mathematician in whom Newton took a personal interest of a kind unusual with him. Manuel makes much of this in Freudian terms supposing that Newton found it difficult to accept homosexual impulses breaking through his habitual control, but firm evidence seems to be lacking. In an unpublished lecture, have suggested that Newton's illness was a not uncommon variety of mid-life depression in which he had to come to terms with the fact that his great days of inventiveness were over.
Dr D.T. Whiteside, whose eight-volume edition of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton is still incompletely published, has been kind enough to inform me that Newton was still able to carry out original mathematical work after he left Cambridge and moved to London in 1696. Professor Westfall has been content, as I was, with the conventional view that, The crisis of 1693 terminated his creative activity,' but Dr Whiteside's information makes this doubtful, as is so much about Newton's history. We are not even sure of Newton's sexual orientation, though his letters to Fatio certainly make it likely that his affections were mostly directed towards his own sex. Dr Whiteside informs me that there is evidence that an 'Isaac Newton' actually contracted a marriage and had two children who died at about the time at which Newton was taking his B.A. Since Newton was a common name in Woolsthorpe, we cannot be certain that it was the Isaac Newton who interests us; but it would obviously have been in his interest to conceal such a marriage, which would have prevented him from obtaining a Fellowship.
It is commonly held that Newton died a virgin; whether or not the story that he told a relative that he had never 'violated chastity' is true, it seems certain that Newton belonged to that large assembly of distinguished thinkers who were not hampered by family ties. The same is true of Descartes, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Perhaps the capacity for the higher flights of abstract thought only occurs in those who find continuing intimate relationships difficult of attainment. Perhaps, also, intense concentration upon difficult problems is easily interrupted by emotional demands and the patter of tiny feet.
Previous page
