The Life of Sir Isaac Newton

by David Brewster

This extraordinary effect was first communicated to the world in the Life of Newton by M. Biot, who received the following account of it from the celebrated M. Van Swinden.

“There is among the manuscripts of the celebrated Huygens a small journal in folio, in which he used to note down different occurrences. It is side ζ, No. 8, p. 112, in the catalogue of the library of Leyden. The following extract is written by Huygens himself, with whose handwriting I am well acquainted, having had occasion to peruse several of his manuscripts and autograph letters. ‘On the 29th May, 1694, M. Colin,[75] a Scotsman, informed me that eighteen months ago the illustrious geometer, Isaac Newton, had become insane, either in consequence of his too intense application to his studies, or from excessive grief at having lost, by fire, his chymical laboratory and several manuscripts. When he came to the Archbishop of Cambridge, he made some observations which indicated an alienation of mind. He was immediately taken care of by his friends, who confined him to his house and applied remedies, by means of which he had now so far recovered his health that he began to understand the Principia.’” Huygens mentioned this circumstance to Leibnitz, in a letter dated 8th June, 1694, to which Leibnitz replies in a letter dated the 23d, “I am very glad that I received information of the cure of Mr. Newton, at the same time that I first heard of his illness, which doubtless must have been very alarming. ‘It is to men like you and him, sir, that I wish a long life.’”

The first publication of the preceding statement produced a strong sensation among the friends and admirers of Newton. They could not easily believe in the prostration of that intellectual strength which had unbarred the strongholds of the universe. The unbroken equanimity of Newton’s mind, the purity of his moral character, his temperate and abstemious life, his ardent and unaffected piety, and the weakness of his imaginative powers, all indicated a mind which was not likely to be overset by any affliction to which it could be exposed. The loss of a few experimental records could never have disturbed the equilibrium of a mind like his. If they were the records of discoveries, the discoveries themselves indestructible would have been afterward given to the world. If they were merely the details of experimental results, a little time could have easily reproduced them. Had these records contained the first fruits of early genius—of obscure talent, on which fame had not yet shed its rays, we might have supposed that the first blight of such early ambition would have unsettled the stability of an untried mind. But Newton was satiated with fame. His mightiest discoveries were completed and diffused over all Europe, and he must have felt himself placed on the loftiest pinnacle of earthly ambition. The incredulity which such views could not fail to encourage was increased by the novelty of the information. No English biographer had ever alluded to such an event. History and tradition were equally silent, and it was not easy to believe that the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a member of the English parliament, and the first philosopher in Europe could have lost his reason without the dreadful fact being known to his own countrymen.

But if the friends of Newton were surprised by the nature of the intelligence, they were distressed at the view which was taken of it by foreign philosophers. While one maintained that the intellectual exertions of Newton had terminated with the publication of the Principia, and that the derangement of his mind was the cause of his abandoning the sciences, others indirectly questioned the sincerity of his religious views, and ascribed to the aberration of his mind those theological pursuits which gilded his declining age. “But the fact,” says M. Biot, “of the derangement of his intellect, whatever may have been the cause of it, will explain why, after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Newton, though only forty-five years old, never more published a new work on any branch of science, but contented himself with giving to the world those which he had composed long before that epoch, confining himself to the completion of those parts which might require development. We may also remark, that even these developments appear always to be derived from experiments and observations formerly made, such as the additions to the second edition of the Principia, published in 1713, the experiments on thick plates, those on diffraction, and the chymical queries placed at the end of the Optics in 1704; for in giving an account of these experiments Newton distinctly says that they were taken from ancient manuscripts which he had formerly composed; and he adds, that though he felt the necessity of extending them, or rendering them more perfect, he was not able to resolve to do this, these matters being no longer in his way. Thus it appears that though he had recovered his health sufficiently to understand all his researches, and even in some cases to make additions to them, and useful alterations, as appears from the second edition of the Principia, for which he kept up a very active mathematical correspondence with Mr. Cotes, yet he did not wish to undertake new labours in those departments of science where he had done so much, and where he so distinctly saw what remained to be done.” Under the influence of the same opinion, M. Biot finds “it extremely probable that his dissertation on the scale of heat was written before the fire in his laboratory;” he describes Newton’s conduct about the longitude bill as “almost puerile on so solemn an occasion, and one which might lead to the strangest conclusions, particularly if we refer it to the fatal accident which Newton had suffered in 1695.”

The celebrated Marquis de la Place viewed the illness of Newton in a light still more painful to his friends. He maintained that he never recovered the vigour of his intellect, and he was persuaded that Newton’s theological inquiries did not commence till after that afflicting epoch of his life. He even commissioned Professor Gautier of Geneva to make inquiries on this subject during his visit to England, as if it concerned the interests of truth and justice to show that Newton became a Christian and a theological writer only after the decay of his strength and the eclipse of his reason.

Such having been the consequences of the disclosure of Newton’s illness by the manuscript of Huygens, I felt it to be a sacred duty to the memory of that great man, to the feelings of his countrymen, and to the interests of Christianity itself, to inquire into the nature and history of that indisposition which seems to have been so much misrepresented and misapplied. From the ignorance of so extraordinary an event which has prevailed for such a long period in England, it might have been urged with some plausibility that Huygens had mistaken the real import of the information that was conveyed to him; or that the Scotchman from whom he received it had propagated an idle and a groundless rumour. But we are, fortunately, not confined to this very reasonable mode of defence. There exists at Cambridge a manuscript journal written by Mr. Abraham de la Pryme, who was a student in the university while Newton was a fellow of Trinity. This manuscript is entitled “Ephemeris Vitæ, or Diary of my own Life, containing an account likewise of the most observable and remarkable things that I have taken notice of from my youth up hitherto.” Mr. de la Pryme was born in 1671, and begins the diary in 1685. This manuscript is in the possession of his collateral descendant, George Pryme, Esq., Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, to whom I have been indebted for the following extract.

“1692, February 3d.—What I heard to-day I must relate. There is one Mr. Newton (whom I have very oft seen), Fellow of Trinity College, that is mighty famous for his learning, being a most excellent mathematician, philosopher, divine, &c. He has been Fellow of the Royal Society these many years; and among other very learned books and tracts, he’s written one upon the mathematical principles of philosophy, which has got him a mighty name, he having received, especially from Scotland, abundance of congratulatory letters for the same; but of all the books that he ever wrote, there was one of colours and light, established upon thousands of experiments which he had been twenty years of making, and which had cost him many hundred of pounds. This book, which he valued so much, and which was so much talked of, had the ill luck to perish and be utterly lost just when the learned author was almost at putting a conclusion at the same, after this manner: In a winter’s morning, leaving it among his other papers on his study table while he went to chapel, the candle, which he had unfortunately left burning there too, catched hold by some means of other papers, and they fired the aforesaid book, and utterly consumed it and several other valuable writings; and, which is most wonderful, did no further mischief. But when Mr. Newton came from chapel, and had seen what was done, every one thought he would have run mad, he was so troubled thereat that he was not himself for a month after. A long account of this his system of light and colours you may find in the Transactions of the Royal Society, which he had sent up to them long before this sad mischance happened unto him.”

From this extract we are enabled to fix the approximate date of the accident by which Newton lost his papers. It must have been previous to the 3d January, 1692, a month before the date of the extract; but if we fix it by the dates in Huygens’s manuscript, we should place it about the 29th November, 1692, eighteen months previous to the conversation between Collins and Huygens. The manner in which Mr. Pryme refers to Newton’s state of mind is that which is used every day when we speak of the loss of tranquillity which arises from the ordinary afflictions of life; and the meaning of the passage amounts to nothing more than that Newton was very much troubled by the destruction of his papers, and did not recover his serenity, and return to his usual occupations, for a month. The very phrase that “every person thought he would have run mad” is in itself a proof that no such effect was produced; and, whatever degree of indisposition may be implied in the phrase “he was not himself for a month after,” we are entitled to infer that one month was the period of its duration, and that previous to the 3d February, 1692, the date of Mr. Pryme’s memorandum, “Newton was himself again.”

These facts and dates cannot be reconciled with those in Huygens’s manuscript. It appears from that document, that, so late as May, 1694, Newton had only so far recovered his health as to begin to again understand the Principia. His supposed malady, therefore, was in force from the 3d of January, 1692, till the month of May, 1694,—a period of more than two years. Now, it is a most important circumstance, which M. Biot ought to have known, that in the very middle of this period, Newton wrote his four celebrated letters to Dr. Bentley on the Existence of a Deity,—letters which evince a power of thought and a serenity of mind absolutely incompatible even with the slightest obscuration of his faculties. No man can peruse these letters without the conviction that their author then possessed the full vigour of his reason, and was capable of understanding the most profound parts of his writings. The first of these letters was written on the 10th December, 1692, the second on the 17th January, 1693, the third on the 25th February, and the 4th on the 11th[76] February, 1693. His mind was, therefore, strong and vigorous on these four occasions; and as the letters were written at the express request of Dr. Bentley, who had been appointed to deliver the lecture founded by Mr. Boyle for vindicating the fundamental principles of natural and revealed religion, we must consider such a request as showing his opinion of the strength and freshness of his friend’s mental powers.

In 1692, Newton, at the request of Dr. Wallis, transmitted to him the first proposition of his book on quadratures, with examples of it in first, second, and third fluxions.[77] These examples were written in consequence of an application from his friend; and the author of the review of the Commercium Epistolicum, in which this fact is quoted, draws the conclusion, that he had not at that time forgotten his method of second fluxions. It appears, also, from the second book of the Optics,[78] that in the month of June, 1692, he had been occupied with the subject of haloes, and had made accurate observations both on the colours and the diameters of the rings in a halo which he had then seen around the sun.