Volume 12, Number 7 · April 10, 1969
Shrinking Newton
By P.M. Rattansi
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
by Frank E. Manuel
Harvard, 478 pp., $11.95
Soon after the publication of Newton's Principia the Marquis de l'Hopital is said to have asked if Newton lived, ate, and slept like other men, since that work seemed to him to be the achievement of a pure intelligence. This image of Newton as an almost disembodied rationality, unclouded by human passions and weaknesses, was becoming secure by the early decades of the eighteenth century, while Newton himself, carried by sedan chair to preside over meetings of the Royal Society, outlived adversaries like Hooke, Leibniz, and Flamsteed to whom he had showed an all-too-human side of his nature. It was an image of Newton that was perfectly adapted to the values of Enlightenment rationalism. During the Romantic reaction against those values, Goethe spent years on a rival theory which he believed would restore to colors the ontological reality of which Newton had robbed them. Blake painted a Newton absorbed in the contemplation of dead mathematical abstractions while the beauty of nature glowed in irridescent splendor around him.
Review, 3178 words
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