Newton must have been physically robust, as he not only survived the hazards of prematurity but lived until he was nearly eighty-five. Despite this he was notably hypochondriacal, dosing himself with homemade remedies and recommending medicine to others, and he was often preoccupied with death.
Newton’s religious beliefs were unorthodox. He was an Arian, a secret Unitarian, which is not only peculiar in a fellow of a college named after the Trinity but at that time was regarded as dangerously heretical. He believed that worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, and that Athanasius, who routed Arius in the fourth century in that famous controversy between Homoousians and Homoiousians that so amused Gibbon, had corruptly distorted the early texts of the Christian Fathers. Despite this Newton remained a member of the Church of England, professed orthodoxy when he needed to, and was a determined adversary of Roman Catholicism. When James II ordered that a Benedictine monk be admitted to the degree of M.A. without taking an oath of loyalty to the established church, Newton was one member of the university who bitterly opposed what he saw as an attempt to infiltrate Cambridge with papists. Indeed, he put himself at risk by appearing as one of the university’s delegates before the high commission, chaired by the notorious Judge Jeffreys who had presided over the so-called Bloody Assizes, which had been appointed to inquire as to why the university had not instantly obeyed the King’s command.
Newton’s religious beliefs were puritanical. Notebooks exist showing that at the time of his entry to Trinity he was obsessed with sin. In 1662 he wrote a confession in which he catalogued no less than fifty-eight sins of which he found himself to have been guilty. Most of these were concerned with his failures in religious observance or in his love for and obedience to God. Thus he records that as a child he had been guilty of “eating an apple at Thy house”; “making a mousetrap on Thy day”; “twisting a cord on Sunday morning”; and “squirting water on Thy day.” He also records trivial instances of stealing food, gluttony, and “having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.”8 He also recorded his aggressive thoughts towards his mother and stepfather: “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.”9 There are many depressive ideas about his own lack of worth, dread of punishment, and fear of future disaster. As one biographer notes:
The word love never appears, and expressions of gladness and desire are rare. A liking for roast meat is the only strong sensuous passion. Almost all the statements are negations, admonitions, prohibitions. The climate of life is hostile and punitive. Competitiveness, orderliness, self control, gravity,—these are Puritan values that became part of his being.10
At this date, therefore, the picture is that of a predominantly depressive character, self-punitive, anxious, and insecure, with poor interpersonal relationships and little capacity for enjoyment. Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian chair, described Newton as possessing a “prodigiously fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper.”11
A lasting distrust of others, which I think it reasonable to derive from his sudden maternal deprivation, led to fear that critics would harm him and that his discoveries would be stolen. Brodetsky, one of his biographers, writes:
He was always somewhat unwilling to face publicity and criticism, and had on more than one occasion declined to have his name associated with published accounts of some of his work. He did not value public esteem as desirable in itself, and feared that publicity would lead to his being harassed by personal relationships—whereas he wished to be free of such entanglements.… Apparently Newton hardly ever published a discovery without being urged to by others: even when he had arrived at the solution of the greatest problem that astronomy has ever had to face he said nothing about it to anybody.12
One of Newton’s most famous and lengthy quarrels originated from his reluctance to publish. This was with the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz. Both men independently invented the calculus, but Newton did not publish his discovery until 1687, although it is clear from his papers that he invented the method in the years 1664–66, when most of his major discoveries were made. Leibniz invented his variety of calculus in 1675–76 and published it in 1684. It was natural that he should claim priority. The dispute was vituperative on both sides, but Newton’s violence and vengefulness seem to have been out of all proportion. In one set of memoirs Newton is recorded as saying “pleasantly” that “he had broke Leibniz’s heart with his reply to him.”13
Newton was notably reluctant to acknowledge his indebtedness to others, and this seems to have been the occasion of another quarrel, with Flamsteed, the astronomer royal. For Flamsteed had provided Newton with astronomical observations and felt that his contribution to the Newtonian synthesis had not been sufficiently recognized.
Another running battle was with Robert Hooke, a secretary of the Royal Society and a distinguished scientist. But Hooke not only had the temerity to criticize Newton’s theory of light, which led to Newton’s threatening to resign from the Royal Society, but also claimed priority in discovering the inverse square law. In one sense this was probably true, but, as Newton claimed, Hooke had been unable to prove the law, while he, Newton, had demonstrated it mathematically.
These are far from being the only disputes in which Newton was involved, but enough has been said to show that along with the depressive traits in his character was a strongly paranoid streak. Newton was no more able to cope with the hostility of others than he was with his own, and was apt to see slights when none were intended and to exaggerate any that were. Even his friend, the philosopher Locke, said of him, “A nice man to deal with [meaning touchy and hypersensitive] and a little too apt to raise in himself suspicions where there is no ground.”14
In line with Newton’s isolation and suspiciousness was his lack of trust in the senses, a characteristic familiar to psychiatrists who treat schizoid persons, for they are commonly “out of touch” with physical experience. In one passage Newton wrote, “The nature of things is more securely and naturally deduced from their operations one upon another than upon our senses.”15 In this connection it is worth noting that Newton’s style of writing, even when he is not dealing with mathematics or physical phenomena, is devoid of metaphor and nearly bare of adjectives. He was suspicious of the poetic and the imaginative, and his arid style reflects this.
In his Freud memorial lecture, “The Nature of Genius,”16 Ernest Jones points out that one feature of Freud’s psychology was a peculiar skepticism, a refusal to acquiesce in the generally accepted conclusions of others. He goes on to say that in certain areas, Freud also displayed an unexpected credulity, which at times bordered on superstition. Jones goes on to suppose that this combination of opposites in one person is characteristic of genius and quotes Newton as one of several examples. In his scientific work Newton took nothing on trust and was rigorous in demanding that his hypotheses be supported by mathematical proof. But there was another side to his character. Until he left Cambridge for London in 1696, he was deeply preoccupied with alchemy. This preoccupation was not merely scientific interest in what was partly the precursor of chemistry but a reflection of his belief that the secrets of nature had been revealed to the ancients and that the alchemists possessed esoteric knowledge concealed in hieroglyphs that required decipherment. As Sherwood Taylor writes in his book on alchemy: “Alchemy … was essentially religious. Its philosophy aimed at the unification of all nature in a single scheme, the author of which was avowed to be God.”17 This was also Newton’s aim, and he left a vast pile of manuscripts concerned with alchemy, which has always disconcerted scientists who like to imagine him as possessing a rational intellect unclouded by superstition.
Newton was credulous also in that he was euhemeristic, a term derived from the name of Euhemerus of Messina (300 B.C.), who believed the classical gods to have been actual people deified. Newton believed that myths represented real events in human history, albeit requiring interpretation in many instances. He spent much time and effort in constructing a sy
stem of chronology on the supposition that if the position of the sun relative to the fixed stars could be determined, past events could be dated with certainty. But the key date on which he based his revision of the traditional system was that of the expedition of the Argonauts led by Jason to recover the golden fleece. Newton found it to have taken place in 936 B.C., which cut about four hundred years off the accepted record of Greek history. French historians attacked Newton’s chronology with vigor, much to his chagrin.
Newton was passionately anti-pagan as well as anti-Catholic, and it seems that many of his historical studies were designed to prove that the Israelites, rather than the heathens, had introduced humanity into the ancient world. He seems to have believed that originally all mankind worshipped one God and acknowledged one universal law. Both his major works, the Principia and the Opticks, have religious endings.
I am not asserting that a scientist cannot be both devoutly religious and rigorously objective in experiment, but Newton’s religious beliefs seem to have been peculiar, even for his age, and certainly misled him in his historical studies. Lord Keynes suggests that he thought that God had left clues that could be deciphered, and that he regarded the riddle of the universe in theological terms: “He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.”18
Keynes gained possession of most of a collection of secret papers that Newton assembled on leaving Cambridge for London in 1696. These papers consisted of nearly a million words on church history, alchemy, prophecy, and other biblical writings, besides disclosing the Unitarianism that he had sought to conceal. These writings led Keynes to remark:
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partially dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. 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.19
Newton’s religious and historical studies were so extensive that J. W. N. Sullivan calculates that he cannot have given to physics and mathematics more than about a third of his time. Sullivan ends his biography by saying that Newton “was a genius of the first order at something he did not consider to be of the first importance.”20
Newton became mentally ill in 1693, when he was just over fifty. “He broke with his friends, crawled into a corner, accused his intimates of plotting against him, and reported conversations that never took place.”21 In September of that year he wrote to the diarist Pepys, abruptly terminating their relationship. It is significant that in this letter Newton admits that his psychotic episode, like so many others, was preceded by anorexia and insomnia. He also retains some insight: “I am extremely troubled at the embroilment I am in, and have neither ate nor slept well this twelve month, nor have my former consistency of mind.”22 It has been suggested that Newton, who performed chemical experiments in his rooms, was suffering from poisoning by mercury; but, although insomnia, loss of memory, and delusions do occur in this condition, there is no mention of the characteristic features of tremor and loss of teeth, and the symptoms subsided too quickly for the diagnosis to be likely.
Newton alleged that a fellow of Magdalene called Millington had importuned him with messages from Pepys and made him promise that he would visit Pepys in London, but this allegation is thought to have been delusional. Newton continues: “I never designed to get anything by your interest, not by King James’s favour.… I am now sensible that I must withdraw from your acquaintance, and see neither you nor the rest of my friends any more, if I may leave them quietly.”23
A letter to the philosopher Locke, evidently written when his disturbance was beginning to subside, runs:
Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly & would not live I answered twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness. For I am now satisfied that what you have done is just & I beg your pardon for my having hard thoughts of you for it & for representing that you struck at the root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas & designed to pursue in another book & that I took you for a Hobbist. I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking that there was a designe to sell me an office or embroile me.24
Both Pepys and Locke realized that Newton was ill and were solicitous in offering help. The period at which Newton was accusing his friends was succeeded by depression, as may be deduced from the letter from which I have just quoted; and it seems probable that the paranoid ideas that Newton exhibited were in fact secondary to depression, just as in youth his diaries show more of self-accusation than of accusation of others. But Newton possessed a mixture of traits that were manifested in exaggerated form during his illness.
The faults of which he accused others were clearly his own. His preoccupation with place-seeking, soon to be rewarded, may be traced to his ambition: his fear of being embroiled with women, to his almost total suppression of sexuality. His calling Locke a Hobbist, which meant atheist, may have been related to his own doubts about the nature of God. Three years earlier Newton had written a vehemently anti-Trinitarian tract but had withdrawn it from publication. Professor Manuel lays great emphasis on Newton’s affection for a much younger man, a Swiss scientist named Fatio de Duillier, and supposes that his breakdown may have been precipitated by his recognition that this affection contained homosexual elements.25 Newton certainly wrote to the young man in terms more intimate than those he usually employed. “Yours most affectionately to serve you,” he ends one letter. In another he offers him money to pay doctors when he is ill. Freud would certainly have agreed with Professor Manuel in supposing that Newton’s breakdown was the result of homosexual impulses that he found intolerable breaking the chains of repression, but firm evidence seems to me to be lacking. I find it at least as convincing to suppose that Newton’s illness was primarily a mid-life depression in which he had to come to terms with the fact that his great days of inventiveness were over. As Manuel points out, he had published the Principia—Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to give it its full title—only in 1687, and he may well have felt that this marked the zenith of his creativity. After his illness he did little fresh work, though Dr. White-side, who is editing Newton’s mathematical papers, informs me that he was still capable of original work. His creativeness declined, but his appetite for power found ample fulfillment.
Although Newton’s illness was short-lived, rumors that he was mad spread far and wide, fueled no doubt by envy and the delight that lesser mortals often experience when great men run into trouble. Newton made a good recovery in most respects, however, and became an able administrator. In 1696 he became warden of the Mint, then master of the Mint, and in 1703 president of the Royal Society. He was also knighted. As master of the Mint one of his duties was to prosecute forgers and coiners. He did this with efficiency and relish, and seems personally to have conducted the interrogation of such criminals in the Tower. In Chapter 1, “Churchill: The Man,” I drew attention to the fact that those who carry within themselves aggressive impulses that they have difficulty discharging find relief in acquiring a legitimate enemy. For Newton the coiners served the same function as did Hitler for Churchill.
Newton died in March 1727, in his eighty-fifth year. No other scientist, until the appearance of Einstein, has won such u
niversal acclaim. As we have seen, his personality was unusual. I think it legitimate to attribute many of his pathological traits to the circumstances of his early life, his prematurity, his lack of a father, and his abandonment by his mother. I turn now to the much more difficult and controversial question of whether his personality and his discoveries can in any way be related to one another.
Newton’s main discoveries were made in 1664–66, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. It is characteristic of physicists and mathematicians to make their major contributions early in life, which is unlike creative people working in the arts, who may not come to maturity until much later. During those two years Newton formulated his basic laws of mechanics, his optical observations on the nature of light, the calculus, and the law of universal gravitation. This latter discovery is generally supposed to have been made in his mother’s garden in Lincolnshire, for Newton twice left Cambridge (from June 1665 to March 1666, and from June 1666 to April 1667) to avoid the great plague, which closed the university. He himself recalled: “All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666 for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since.”26
The Newtonian synthesis was based on the discoveries of Kepler, who had been able to describe the motions of the planets round the sun, combined with those of Galileo, who had described the laws of motion of objects upon the earth. Until Newton these two sets of laws seemed to be quite separate. But when Newton made the leap of imagination that led him to suppose that gravity was a universal that acted at enormous distances, he combined the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo in such a way that the motions of bodies in the heavens and bodies on earth could be seen to obey the same universal laws. The law of gravitation, which states that “every body attracts every other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,” has been described as the greatest generalization achieved by the human mind. To prove his law Newton had to show that the path of the moon round the earth could be accounted for by the interaction of the gravitational force on it, which he supposed the earth to be exerting, together with the centrifugal force of the moon, the formula for which had already been discovered by Huygens. His mathematical gift enabled him to accomplish this. He then computed the sun’s attraction on the planets and showed that their orbits, which Kepler had described but for which he could not account, complied with the same laws. Newton left a diagram that anticipates the possibility of artificial satellites by showing that increasing the velocity of a projectile will eventually result in its circling the earth at the same velocity forever.
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