NOTHING is more difficult than to settle | miscellaneous material and bulk. But if we who is the most illustrious, the most to be admired, in any walk of human greatness. Those who would brain us-if they could but imagine us to have any brains-for hinting that it may be a question whether Shakspeare be the first of poets, would perhaps have been Homerites a century ago. In these disputes there is more than matter of opinion, or of taste, or of period: there is also matter of quantity, question of how much, without any possibility of bringing the thing to trial by scale. This element of difficulty is well illustrated by an exception. Among inquirers into what our ignorance calls the laws of nature, an undisputed preeminence is given to ISAAC NEWTON, as well by the popular voice, as by the deliberate suffrage of his peers. The right to this supremacy is almost demonstrable. It would be difficult to award the palm to the swiftest, except by set trial, with one starting-place and one goal: nor could we easily determine the strongest among the strong, if the weights they lifted were of Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. By Sir DAVID BREWSTER, K. H., &c., &c. Two volumes 870. Constable & Co. Edinburgh, 1855. VOL. XXXVI.-NO. II, saw one of the swiftest among the runners keep ahead of nearly all his comrades, with one of the heaviest of the weights upon his shoulders, we should certainly place him above all his rivals, whether in activity alone, or in strength alone. Though Achilles were the swifter, and Hercules the stronger, a good second to both would be placed above either. This is a statement of Newton's case. We cannot say whether or no he be the first of mathematicians, though we should listen with a feeling of possibility of conviction to those who maintain the affirmative. We cannot pronounce him superior to all men in the sagacity which guides the observer of-we mean rather deducer fromnatural phenomena, though we should be curious to see what name any six competent jurors would unanimously return before his. But we know that, in the union of the two powers, the world has never seen a man comparable to him, unless it be one in whose case remoteness of circumstances creates great difficulty of comparison. Far be it from us to say that if Newton had been Canopolis, a Sicilian Greek, he would have surpassed Archimedes; or that if Archi 46 he is more under the influence of his time, than under its fear: but very great is the difference between the writer of the present volumes and that of the shorter life in the Family Library in 1831; though, if there be any truth in metaphysics, they are the same person. medes had been Professor Firstrede, of Trinity | College, Cambridge, he would have been below Newton. The Syracusan is, among the ancients, the counterpart of the Englishman among the moderns. Archimedes is perhaps the first among the geometers: and he stands alone in ancient physics. He gave a new geometry-the name was afterwards applied The two deans of optical science, in Britain to the infinitesimal calculus-out of which he and in France, Sir David Brewster and M. or a successor would soon have evolved an Biot, are both biographers of Newton, and infinitesimal calculus, if algebra had been take rather different sides on disputed points. known in the West. He founded the sciences Sir D. Brewster was the first writer on optics of statics and hydrostatics, and we cannot in whose works we took an interest: but we learn that any hint of application of geometry do not mean printed works. We, plural as to physics had previously been given. No we are, remember well the afternoon, we Cavalieri, no Fermat, no Wallis, went before should say the half-holiday, when the kaleidohim in geometry: there was not even a scope which our ludi-magister-most aptly chance of a contemporary Leibnitz. We can- named for that turn--had just received from not decide between Archimedes and Newton: London was confided to our care. We rethe two form a class by themselves into member the committee of conservation, and which no third name can be admitted; and the regulation that each boy should, at the the characteristic of that class is the union, in first round, have the uninterrupted enjoyment most unusual quantity, of two kinds of power of the treasure for three minutes: and we renot only distinct, but so distinct that either member, further, that we never could have has often been supposed to be injurious to believed it took so very short a time to boil the favorable development of the other. an egg. A fig for Jupiter and his satellites, and their inhabitants too, if any! What should we have thought of Galileo, when placed by the side of the inventor of this wonder of wonders, who had not only made his own telescope, but his own starry firmament? The inventor of the kaleidoscope must have passed the term allotted to man, before he put his hand to the actual concoction of these long-meditated volumes; in which we find the only life of Newton written on a scale commensurate with Newton's fame. But though he has passed the term, he has not incurred the penalty: his strength is labor without sorrow. We trust therefore that the still later age, the full fourscore, will find him in the enjoyment of the additional fame which he has so well earned. And since his own scientific sensibilities are keen, as evidenced by many a protest against what he conceives to be general neglect on the part of ruling powers, we hope they will make him fully feel that he has linked his own name to that of his first object of human reverence for as long as our century shall retain a place in literary history. This will be conceded by all, how much soever they may differ from the author in opinions or conclusions: and though we shall proceed to attack several of Sir D. Brewster's positions, and though we have no besitation in affirming that he is still too much of a biographer, and too little of an historian, we admire his earnest enthusiasm, and fell as strongly as any one of his assentients the ser The scientific fame of Newton, the power which he established over his contemporaries, and his own general high character, gave birth to the desirable myth that his goodness was paralleled only by his intellect. That unvarying dignity of mind is the necessary concomitant of great power of thought, is a pleasant creed, but hardly attainable except by those whose love for their faith is insured by their capacity for believing what they like. The hero is all hero, even to those who would he loath to pay the compliment of perfect imitation. Pericles, no doubt, thought very little of Hector dragged in the dust behind the chariot and Atticus we can easily suppose to have found some three-quarter excuse for Romulus when he buried his sword in his brother's body by way of enforcing a retort. The dubious actions of Newton, certainly less striking than those of the heroes of antiquity, have found the various gradations of suppressors, extenuators, defenders, and admirers. But we live, not merely in sceptical days, which doubt of Troy and will none of Romulus, but in discriminating days, which insist on the distinction between intellect and morals. Our generation, with no lack of idols of its own, has rudely invaded the temples in which science worships its founders: and we have before us a biographer who feels that he must abandon the demigod, and admit the impugners of the man to argument without one cry of blasphemy. To do him justice, which Newton and his contemporaries once and again treated all who did not bow to the idol, should have been loath to see the garrison which our opponents have placed in the contested forts march out with the honors of war, under a convention made on distant ground, and on a newly-discovered basis of treaty. Again, there is a convenient continuity in the first disclosure of these docu sion which they excite will be better understood when the defender of Newton is the first to have recourse to Newton's own papers. vice he has rendered to our literature. When a century or two shall have passed, we predict it will be said of our day that the time was not come when both sides of the social character of Newton could be trusted to his follower in experimental science. Though biography be no longer an act of worship, it is not yet a solemn and impartial judgment: we are in the intermediate stage, in which advocacy is the aim, and in which the bio-ments coming from an advocate: the discusgrapher, when a thought more candid than usual, avows that he is to do his best for his client. We accept the book as we find it: we expect an ex parte statement, and we have it. The minor offence is sometimes admitted, with what we should call the art of an able counsel, if we did not know that the system of the advocate in court is but the imitation of all that is really telling in the natural practices of the partisan defender. But Sir D. Brewster stands clear of the imputation of art by the mixture of all which art would avoid. A judicious barrister, when he has to admit some human nature in his client, puts an additional trump upon the trick by making some allowance for the other side; and nothing puts the other side in so perilous a predicament. It is not so with Sir D. Brewster. When sins against Newton are to be punished, we hear Juvenal; when Newton is to be reprimanded, we hear a nice and delicate Horace, who can In reverend bishops note some small defects; We have more reasons than one for desiring Of Newton's birth, of his father's death and the subsequent marriage of his mother, we need say nothing. He was not born with a title, though he was the son of the lord of a very little manor, a yeoman's plot of land with a baronial name. But the knighthood clings strongly to his memory. Sir David (and on looking back, we see that the Doctor did just the same) seldom neglects it. When the schoolboy received a kick from a schoolfellow, it was "Sir Isaac" who fought him in the churchyard, and it was "Sir Isaac" who rubbed his antagonist's nose against the wall in sign of victory. Should we survive Sir David, we shall Brewster him: we hold that those who are gone, when of a certain note, are entitled to the compliment of the simplest nomenclature. The childhood and boyhood of Newton were distinguished only by great skill in mechanical contrivance. No tradition, no remaining record, imputes any very early progress either in mathematics or general learning, beyond what is seen in thousands of clever boys in any one year of the world. That he was taken from farming occupations, and sent back to school, because he loved study, is told us in general terms; but what study we are not told. We have always been of opinion that the diversion of Newton's flow of reason into its proper channel was the work of the University and its discipline. He was placed at Trinity College as a subsizar in his nineteenth year. We have no proof, but rather the contrary, that he had then opened Euclid. That he was caught solving a problem under a hedge is recorded: perhaps a knotty question of wheelwork. He bought a Euclid at Cambridge, and threw it aside as a trifling book, because the conclusions were so evident: he betook himself to Descartes, and afterwards lamented that he had not given proper attention to Euclid. All this is written, and Sir David is bound to give it; but what Newton has written belies it. We put faith in the Principia, which is neglect of logic by citing his supposed example, and that of other great men: but it now appears that Newton was not only conversant with Barbara, Celarent, &c., but even with Fecana, Cajeti, Dafenes, Hebare, Gadaco, &c. We have often remarked that Newton, as in the terminal scholium of the Principia, had more acquaintance with the mode of thought of the schoolmen than any ordinary account of his early reading would suffice to explain. We strongly suspect that he made further incursions into the old philosophy, and brought away the idea of fluxions, which had been written on, though not in mathematical form, nor under that name. Suisset's tract on intension and remission is fluxional, though not mathematical in the very first paragraph he says that the word intension is used uno modo pro alteratione mediante qua qualitas acquiritur: et sic loquendo intensio est motus. For qualitas read quantitas, and we are as near to Newton's idea as we can well be. the work of an inordinate Eucleidian, constantly attempting to clothe in the forms of ancient geometry methods of proceeding which would more easily have been presented by help of algebra. Shall we ever be told that Bacon complained of the baldness of his own style, and wished he had obtained command over metaphor? Shall we learn that Cobbett lamented his constant flow of Gallicism and west-end slang, and regretted that his English had not been more Saxon? If we do, we shall have three very good stories instead of one. We may presume, as not unlikely, that Newton, untrained in any science, threw away bis Euclid at first, as very evident: no one need be Newton to feel the obvious premise, or to draw the unwise conclusion. But it would belong to his tutor to make him know better: and Newton was made, as we shall see, to know better accordingly. Our reader must not imagine that deep philosophy and high discovery were discernible in the young subsizar. He was, as to what had come out, a clever and somewhat self-willed lad, rather late at school, with his heart in the keeping of a young lady who lived in the house where he had boarded, and vice versa, more than commonly ingenious in the construction of models, with a good notion of a comet as a thing which might be imitated, to the terror of a rustic neighborhood, by a lantern in a kite's tail, and with a tidy and more than boyish notion of an experiment, as proved by his making an anemometer of himself by trial of jumping with and against the wind. In that tremendous storm in which many believed that Oliver Cromwell's reputed patron came to carry him away, and in which he certainly died, the immortal author of the theory of gravitation was measuring he little knew what, by jumping to and fro. We do not desire to see boys take investiture of And this when he was greatness from their earliest playtime: we deep in Descartes' geometry of co-ordinates. like to watch the veneration of a biographer We entertain no doubt that the unwise congrowing with its cause, and the attraction tempt for demonstration of evident things, so varying with some inverse power of the dis-often cited as a proof of great genius, and tance. And further, we are rather pleased to find that Newton was what mammas call a great boy before he was a great man. Of all the books which Newton read before he went to Cambridge only one is mentioned -Sanderson's Logic: this he studied so thoroughly that when he came to college lectures he was found to know it better than his tutor. The work is, for its size, unusually rich in the scholastic distinctions and the parva logicalia; very good for thought to those who can sound the depths. Newton's Cambridge successors are apt to defend their In less than four years from the time concerning which we have presumed to ridicule the joint attempt of Conduitt and the biographers to create a dawn for which there is no evidence, the sun rose indeed. Shortly after Newton took his B. A. degree, in 1665, he was engaged on his discovery of fluxions: but there is neither record nor tradition of his having taken his degree with any unusual distinction. Conduitt's information on this period must be absurdly wrong in its dates. We are to believe that the young investigator who conceived fluxions in May, 1665, was, at some time in 1664, found wanting in geometry by Barrow, and thereby led not only to study Euclid more attentively, but to "form a more favorable estimate of the ancient geometry when he came to the interesting propositions on the equality of parallelograms. its correction by Barrow, all took place in the first few months of his residence at Cambridge. His copy of Descartes, yet existing, is marked in various places, Error, error, non est Geom. No such phrase as non est Geometria would have been used, except by one who had not only read Euclid, but had contracted some of that bias in favor of Greek geometry, which is afterwards so manifest in the Principia. Pemberton, who speaks from communication with Newton, and is a better authority than Conduitt, tells us that Newton regretted that he had not paid more attention to Euclid. And Doctor Sangrado, when the patient died, regretted that he had not prescribed more bleeding and warm water. The Principia bears already abundant marks of inordinate attachment to the ancient geometry; in one sense, it has died in consequence. If Newton had followed his own path of invention, and written it in fluxions, the young student of modern analysis could have read it to this day, and would have read it with interest: as it is, he reads but a section or two, and this only in Epgland. Before 1669, the year of his appointment to the Lucasian chair, all Newton's discoveries had germed in his mind. The details are notorious, and Sir D. Brewster is able to add a remarkable early paper on fluxions to those already before the world. We here come upon the well-known letter to Mr. Aston, a young man about to travel, which, as Sir David says, "throws a strong light on the character and opinions of its author." It does indeed, and we greatly regret that the mode in which that character has been represented as the perfection of highmindedness compels us to examine this early exhibition of it, in connection with one of a later date. Newton is advising his young friend how to act if he should be insulted. Does he recommend him, as a Christian man, to entertain no thought of revenge, and to fear his own conscience more than the contempt of others? Or, as a rational man, does he dissuade him from the folly of submitting the decision of his difference to the logic of sword or pistol? Or, supposing him satisfied by well-known sophisms that the duel is noble and necessary, does he advise his friend to remember that dishonor is dishonor everywhere? He writes as follows: and Mary, "because," says he, "I hold it to be their interest to set the best face upon things, after the example of the London divines." And again, "Those at Cambridge ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honor them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience." What had Newton and passive obedience just been doing with King James? These instances, apart from science, show us the character of Newton out of science: he had not within himself the source from whence to inculcate high and true motives of action upon others; the fear of man was before his eyes. But his mind has been represented as little short of godlike and we are forced upon proof of the contrary. Had it been otherwise, had his defects been duly admitted, it would have been pleasant to turn to his uncompromising philosophic writings, and to the manner in which, when occupied with the distinction between scientific truth and falsehood, no meaner distinction ever arose in his mind. This would have been, but for his worshippers, our chief concern with him. The time will come when his social weaknesses are only quoted in proof of the completeness with which a high feeling may rule the principal occupation of life, which has a much slighter power over the subordinate ones. Strange as it may seem, there have been lawyers who have been honest in their practice, and otherwise out of it: there have been physicians who have shown humanity and kindness, such as no fee could ever buy, at the bedside of the patient and nowhere else. Sir David Brewster gives Newton's career in optics at great length; it is his own subject, and he makes us feel how completely he is at home. He gives a cursory glance at the science even down to our own time; and he does the same with astronomy. The biographer would rather have had more of the time of Newton, and particularly more extracts from the Portsmouth papers. But we must think of our neighbors as well as of ourselves and the general reader will be glad to know that so much of the work is especially intended for him. We have not space to write an abstract: but the book is very readable. In the turmoil of discussion which arose out of his optical announcements, Newton made the resolution, which he never willingly broke, of continuing his researches only for his own private satisfaction. I see, said he, that a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it. It seems that he expected all his |