Newton, page 12
Desaguliers’s courses on mechanics owed more to his involvement in entrepreneurial engineering projects than to his careful perusal of the Principia. Financial arguments pack more persuasive punch than mathematical ones, and for many people, the effectiveness of the numerous pumps, ventilators and irrigation pipes that Desaguliers installed provided the most convincing evidence that Newtonian philosophy was worth studying. Gullible investors did of course lose their money, and Desaguliers carefully spelled out the intrinsic performance limitations of his machines as ‘a very necessary Caution; for there are several Persons who have Money, that are ready to supply boasting Engineers with it, in hopes of great Returns and especially if the Project has the Sanction of an Act of Parliament to support it – and then the Bubble becomes compleat, and ends in Ruin’.51 By helping to produce a nation well versed in Newtonian ideas and dependent on Newtonian machines, Desaguliers encouraged the mutually profitable alliance of commerce and natural philosophy that underpinned England’s development into the world’s first industrial economy.
4
ENEMIES
The Horse of Intellect is leaping from the cliffs of Memory and Reasoning; it is a barren Rock: it is also called the Barren Waste of Locke and Newton.
William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809)
Newton was not above twisting the evidence to make the figures match his theories. The Principia persuasively argued that his cosmology was based on precise calculation and measurement – hence the word ‘mathematical’ in its title. But when the book first appeared, Newton realized that numerical discrepancies in the fine details of his system threatened its acceptance. As he battled to refute his continental critics – especially the detested Leibniz – Newton revised his calculations of the velocity of sound. Choosing a quiet arcade in Trinity College, he repeated his own measurements on echoes and manipulated the conveniently vague ‘crassitude’ of air particles until his recorded observations corresponded unbelievably closely to his theoretical predictions. In addition, discreetly massaging records of lunar distances and tidal heights, he instructed the overworked editor of the Principia’s second edition how far to ‘mend the numbers’.1
Despite this ambivalent attitude towards philosophical fiddling, Newton became notorious for his determination to stamp out financial forgery. At the Mint, ‘that old Dogg the Warden’ relentlessly pursued coin counterfeiters to the gallows by collecting testimony from hundreds of witnesses, hiring spies to penetrate underworld networks, and rewarding informers who saved their own lives by naming their friends.
Life was not so very different in intellectual circles, as antagonists accused each other of doctoring observations, plagiarizing books and stealing new inventions. Loyal acolytes reported that Newton ‘conversed chearfully with his friends assumed nothing & put himself upon a level with all mankind’. In contrast, his critics portrayed a scheming, secretive opportunist who trampled on opponents and bribed supporters to help fashion his reputation as the world’s greatest natural philosopher. Establishing himself as the leading searcher after truth did not necessarily entail telling the truth. 2
According to one of Newton’s hagiographers, he ‘had a particular aversion to disputes, and was with difficulty induced to enter into any controversy’.3 Such posthumous whitewashing conveniently ignored accounts of Newton’s numerous vituperative conflicts. One of his bitterest enemies was Robert Hooke, a gifted experimenter who constantly struggled to protect his inventions and his ideas against intellectual piracy. That there is no surviving portrait of Hooke corroborates cruel barbs about his physical appearance, but also reflects his relatively low social status. Unlike the wealthy gentlemen with whom he worked, Hooke was an employee at the Royal Society, the Curator of Experiments appointed to contrive experimental trials and entertaining demonstrations.
Hooke supervised a host of assistants who were essential for the Society’s activities, but were acknowledged only fleetingly in written records. Just as these behind-the-scenes helpers have become virtually invisible, it now seems clear that while Hooke’s contemporaries paid his salary, they effectively diminished his posthumous reputation by failing to credit his vital contributions to the new techniques of experimental philosophy. Allegedly a reclusive, workaholic insomniac, Hooke displayed many characteristics that might have earned him the label of genius had he occupied a less menial role and not been so obviously concerned to profit from his inventions. For thirty years, until his death in 1703, Hooke repeatedly accused Newton of appropriating theories that he had himself originated.4
Newton professed to welcome criticisms, but he never forgave Hooke for pointing out a fundamental error in one of his arguments, an injury he nursed for decades. At first they exchanged civil expressions of interest in each other’s work, and it was in one of Newton’s politer self-defensive letters to Hooke that he famously declared, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.’5
Their relationship deteriorated irrevocably while Newton was completing the initial edition of the Principia, when Hooke and his allies insisted that Hooke had been the first to point out that the elliptical path of the planets round the sun can be described by an inverse-square law of attraction. Determined to retain his priority, Newton wrote angry letters to his colleagues in which he justified his position by protesting that even though the idea might originally have been Hooke’s, he – Newton – deserved all the credit for performing the hard mathematical labour. Protesting unconvincingly that he wanted to retreat from the litigious world of natural philosophy, before handing over his manuscript for publication Newton petulantly deleted ‘the very distinguished’ from his references to Hooke. And it is surely no coincidence that Newton delayed publishing the Opticks until the year after Hooke’s death.
Newton took critics like Hooke very seriously, not only to establish his priority and protect himself against plagiarism, but also because he recognized the vulnerability of his philosophy. Newton constantly fought to defend his reputation, a task continued by his successors, who worked hard throughout the next three centuries to ward off rival claimants for Newton’s unique status. Constantly emended, Newton’s texts became riddled with vague conjectures and internal contradictions, as well as statements that would later be denounced as wrong. Yet his propagandists zealously guarded his reputation, so that his ideological role survived unscathed.
As challenges to Newton’s hegemony arose, his disciples were forced to protect their master from the attacks of powerful opponents like Leonhard Euler, an eminent member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In the middle of the eighteenth century, he dared to contradict Newton openly. Newton had stated that it is intrinsically impossible to make an achromatic telescope lens, one that does not show coloured fringes round the image. But, Euler provocatively pointed out, Newton was surely wrong, since God had already created His own achromatic lens: the human eye. Irked, the Royal Society deputed the optician John Dollond as spokesman to defend English honour. Dollond argued that Newton’s word was tantamount to proof, so that it was ‘somewhat strange, that any body now-a-days should attempt to do that, which so long ago has been demonstrated impossible’. Convinced by his own rhetoric that anything ‘that great man’ had said simply must be true, Dolland failed to repeat Newton’s original experiments for almost another ten years. But when he did, he discovered that Euler had been right – Newton was wrong! Promptly marketing a revolutionary achromatic telescope based on Euler’s discovery, the opportunistic Dollond sat for his portrait smugly clutching a copy of Newton’s Opticks, a bookmark noting the contested page.6
Despite such peripheral snipes, Newton’s iconic status continued to grow, even though his philosophical ideas were constantly under attack. Resistance to Newton stemmed not only from scientific and metaphysical reservations, but also from religious and political considerations. It can be mapped socially as well as geographically. In Britain, this opposition lasted particularly long among Tory High Church communities, while in Europe, doubts about adopting a foreign system were often stronger in Catholic countries and absolutist states. By around 1760, the nationalistic implications of this philosophical battle were so widely known that Newton’s French and German rivals had even entered patriotic drinking songs:
The atoms of Cartes Sir Isaac destroyed;
Leibnitz pilfer’d our countryman’s fluxions;
Newton found out attraction, and prov’d nature’s void
Spite of prejudic’d Plenum’s constructions.
Gravitation can boast,
In the form of my toast,
More power than all of them knew, Sir.7
Textbook writers may have adopted a more restrained style, but they expressed the same sentiments, vigorously denouncing foreign ‘romantic systems’ of natural philosophy and declaring that ‘the Newtonian philosophy may indeed be improved, and further advanced; but it can never be overthrown: notwithstanding the efforts of all the Bernouilli’s, the Leibniz’s, the Green’s, the Berkeley’s, the Hutchinson’s, &c.’. This list, which could easily have been extended, includes some of the Enlightenment’s foremost thinkers. Far from being eccentric outsiders, many of Newton’s critics were prominent mathematicians and philosophers, whose opinions were highly respected.8
Newton’s major eighteenth-century opponents – Berkeley, Leibniz and Goethe – levelled different types of criticism that influenced their followers. Berkeley was the most eminent and scholarly mouthpiece for High Church antagonism towards Newton’s concept of attraction. Long after his death, Berkeley remained a key source for small religious sects that battered at the increasingly impregnable Newtonian citadel. Leibniz’s feud with Newton is fascinating not only because it was so important to both protagonists, but also because it illustrates the complex political ramifications of what might seem an esoteric debate about mathematics. Goethe, now better known for his literary works, formulated a comprehensive optical science that differed fundamentally in its approach from Newton’s, and affected the course of German science throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, he was a founder member of the German cult of genius. Exported to England, Goethe’s critiques of Newton reached many artists and poets, thus affecting their antipathy towards science as well as fashioning the meaning of genius itself.
An alternative Principia
A new medical fad swept Britain in 1744. ‘Tar water’, reported Adam Smith in a letter home from Oxford University, ‘is a remedy very much in vogue here at present for almost all diseases. It has perfectly cured me of an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head.’ Five years later, barrels of the new medicine were being exported from Europe all over the world, strongly recommended for potentially fatal diseases such as smallpox and leprosy as well as those common eighteenth-century complaints, gout in the stomach and kidney stones. The inventor of this wonder drug was no fly-by-night opportunist, but a practising physician and distinguished Irish bishop concerned to allay the misery of his famine-stricken parishioners. Siris, his long tract extolling the virtues of drinking large volumes of water impregnated with tar, stimulated a virulent pamphlet war between the critics and allies of its august author. However, George Berkeley is now remembered neither as a caring clergyman nor as a dubious doctor, but as one of the century’s most eminent philosophers.9
About a third of the way through, Siris casts off its resemblance to medical promotional material. Laced with forceful denunciations of contemporary immorality, it commutes into a learned diatribe against Newtonian natural philosophy. Berkeley had already roused scholarly controversy by publishing The Analyst, a small yet strongly worded book addressed to an unidentified ‘infidel mathematician’. Although The Analyst was ostensibly designed to undermine the logical foundations of calculus, Berkeley’s chief target had been those religious freethinkers who, following Locke and Newton, claimed to discover God by rational thought rather than close perusal of the Bible. Attacking Newton’s use of infinitely small quantities in his fluxions, Berkeley argued that mathematics was so plagued with logical errors that by comparison, theological expositions seemed a model of clarity.
Like Berkeley, many Tory High Churchmen advocated searching for truth through divine revelation, and they opposed arguments based on mathematical abstraction. In Siris, his last major publication, Berkeley shifted and broadened his focus. Far from being merely advertising copy for a quack remedy, Siris is a weighty tract that explores philosophical and theological objections to Newtonian concepts of matter, space and causality. Berkeley here consolidated some of his earlier objections to Newton’s gravitation. To invoke gravity for describing how apples fall to the ground or planets rotate around the sun, is not, Berkeley argued, to provide an explanation. Words such as force, gravity and attraction are useful for carrying out calculations and making predictions, but do not further our understanding.10
Siris became a foundational text for natural philosophers disillusioned with Newton’s Principia and its explanatory claims. ‘Attraction’, Berkeley protested, ‘cannot produce, and in that sense account for, the phenomena, being itself one of the phenomena produced.’11 Scholars repeatedly worried at the question of whether Newton’s power of attraction was a fundamental cause of nature that produced physical effects, or whether it was itself the consequence of some other cause. Many of Newton’s early critics derided attraction as ‘a late Notion and Assertion in Philosophy, that every thing attracts every thing; which is in effect to say, that nothing attracts any thing’.12
This remained a key issue throughout the eighteenth century because it had important theological as well as scientific ramifications. Newton’s successors attributed different meanings to attraction, often giving it a physical cause. This meant that debates were often not about what Newton had himself written, but about concepts that later became labelled Newtonian. Some opponents argued that making attraction an inherent property of matter was equivalent to endowing an ordinary stone with holy qualities belonging only to God. For them, positing that bodies could attract each other through empty space opened the door to materialists who would blur the orthodox distinction between active spirit and inert matter, between God and the material world. In principle, by mechanizing the human mind, an extreme materialist could dispense with the concept of an immaterial, immortal soul, thus threatening the basic tenets of Christianity. Critics liberally distributed the pejorative label ‘atheist’ to warn people away from Newtonians with whom they disagreed.13
One influential proponent of Berkeley’s critiques was an impoverished curate from Suffolk, William Jones of Nayland. Even in the nineteenth century, some High Church Tories still regarded Jones as their theological inspirer, while readers throughout the country learned about his ideas from books of natural philosophy, and also from browsing through early editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As well as publishing acclaimed theological texts and political pamphlets, Jones wrote two long books on natural philosophy. Patronized by the Tory Earl of Bute, who covered his bills at a prestigious London instrument shop, Jones systematically picked apart Newton’s concept of gravitational attraction in order to uphold his own insistence that such power could be exerted only by God. Apparently ignoring the friendly concern of his ally the Archbishop of Canterbury that he was becoming ‘reputed an heretic in Philosophy’, Jones boasted that ‘Gentleman of the Newtonian side . . . begin to be alarmed about me at Cambridge, & are putting people on their guard.’14
Jones cunningly exposed ambiguities in the interpretations of Newton’s philosophy by constructing an artificial conversation about attraction conducted between Newton and his chief propagandists. Compiled by juxtaposing ten carefully selected real quotations, Jones’s imaginary discussion reduces these grave academics to squabbling children. As a cynical observer commented, he places Newtonians in ‘the theatre of a bear-garden, and sets them all a-tilting on a great battle-royal’. Thus when one of them declares that Newton ‘considered attraction . . . not as a cause, but as an effect’, another contrarily replies, ‘Gravity is the most simple of causes.’ The next one immediately contradicts: for him, attraction means not ‘the cause of bodies tending toward each other, but barely the effect, the effect itself’. To which, inevitably, his neighbour responds that God made attraction ‘the first of second causes’ . . . and so on. Rhetorical devices like this could provide effective propaganda weapons for even the most serious scholars.15
Jones belonged to a small yet vocal philosophical sect called the Hutchinsonians. A deeply religious and learned man, John Hutchinson had been employed as the Duke of Somerset’s steward. As he travelled round the Duke’s country estates, he avidly collected fossils, evidence of the earth’s divine history. In 1724, the Duke awarded him a pension so that he could retire and compose his riposte to Newton, an ambitious account of the earth’s creation that bore a confrontational title: Moses’s Principia. In a punning Frontis-Piss, Hogarth shows these two versions of the Principia lying side by side (Figure 4.1). While Hutchinson’s tome is drenched by the lunar stream that falls inexorably downwards with the force of Newtonian gravity, cabalistic black rats nibble at Newton’s book and telescope.16
Hutchinson’s would-be competitor looked completely unlike Newton’s Principia. Devoid of mathematical diagrams, and littered with Latin quotations and Hebrew characters, Hutchinson’s book focused on Genesis. Hutchinson was horrified that Newton should attribute the power of attraction to matter. For him, it was sacrilegious even to suggest that God, the unapproachable divine essence, could be immanent throughout the corrupt and sordid material world. Newton, he argued, was wrong to study the physical universe in order to learn about God, an approach that veered too close to worshipping Nature itself.
