422. John Locke. Philosopher.
[Born in Somersetshire, 1632. Died at Oates, in Essex, 1704. Aged 72.]
A stern intellect with a pious and gentle heart. Of a good family. He studied for medicine; but his delicate health prevented his engaging in the profession. The study was apparently turned to higher account in settling his contemplation on the real and the useful. He ranks amongst English philosophers as the one who first, by his writings, impressed the fact that the Mind of Man lies before us, if we can attend, as much a subject for observation and for the investigation of laws, as the outwardly sensible world. The impulse given by his teaching to the educated mind of the country was strong and lasting. His successors have introduced, as might be expected, more method and precision into this region of speculation. They have confirmed, enriched, and extended the science, although yet far from having attained that luminous certainty, and that wealth of profitable results, which wonderfully reward the inquirers into the physical order of Nature. Besides his “Essay on the Human Understanding”—for which Locke is called the founder, in England, of modern metaphysical inquiry—he stood up in other works also, as the champion of intellectual liberty, vindicating the rights of Reason in politics and in religion. In the study of the Mind, “he broke the fetters of the schools,” as Bacon had done for physical science. Locke was the friend of Newton.
[By Riesback.]
423. Sir Isaac Newton. Astronomer and Philosopher.
[Born at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, 1642. Died in London, 1727. Aged 85.]
This illustrious man was educated at Grantham, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in the year 1660. Before he had reached his twenty-third year, he had already made various important discoveries in pure mathematics; amongst others, the celebrated “Binomial Theorem,” familiar to every tyro, and that most refined and powerful instrument of scientific investigation, the “Method of Fluxions,” which, a few years later, was independently discovered by the famous Leibnitz, and given to the world in the form now universally known as the “Differential Calculus.” Newton was still young when the fall of an apple gave birth in his mind to the first germ of “the Law of Gravitation,” which, some years later, he so beautifully and wonderfully developed. In 1666—his age twenty-four—he began those experiments with the prism which quickly led him to “The Decomposition of Light,” and to other optical discoveries, unfolded in the lectures delivered by him at Cambridge, as the successor of Barrow, from the year 1669. In his thirtieth year, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; in 1703, its President; and he was re-elected to this distinguished post year after year, for twenty-five years. His great work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” appeared complete in 1687. It has excited the astonishment and profound admiration of the greatest philosophers in all nations, from that time to the present; and no wonder, since, in some respects, this grand production might almost seem to have resulted from actual inspiration, and not from the mere day labour of an unassisted human intellect. The mighty teacher was the originator of views and theories, upon which the ablest philosophical minds of the last century and of the present have built their most renowned achievements, yet we are most admonished by his humility, his religion, and his calm. Newton was member of Parliament for Cambridge. He was also master of the Mint. Honour was shown to him living and dead. George I. ordered that his body should, after lying in state, be buried in Westminster Abbey. What luminary is without its dark spot? Leibnitz and Newton were the two greatest men of their age, yet a bitter and lasting quarrel between them is recorded, for our solemn instruction. It remains to state that the year in which Galileo died, Newton was born. No interval was suffered between the extinction of the one essential light and the kindling of the other.
[By Roubilliac.]
424. Benjamin Franklin. Statesman and Philosopher.
[Born at Boston, in America, 1706. Died at Philadelphia, in America, 1790. Aged 84.]