Newton, page 10
Newton, like many of his contemporaries, held ideas that now often seem outlandish, such as his conviction that Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a monstrous image made from four metals foretold the four successive monarchies of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. He scoured Ezekiel to determine the dimensions of Solomon’s temple, relied on his detailed knowledge of the Apocalypse and breeding patterns of locusts to redate historical events of the Roman Empire, and confirmed Christ’s future eternal reign by translating words into their numerical coded equivalents: most famously, 666 was the number of the Beast.28 Anxious to ensure that he did not meet Whiston’s fate, Newton went to considerable lengths to conceal his heretical theological views, but information did leak out. Unauthorized copies circulated of a manuscript on ancient chronology that Princess Caroline had forced him to write for her. She often boasted to her friends that it was one of her most treasured possessions, and the version of Kneller’s portrait that she owned shows Newton with a Greek copy of the Book of Daniel (Figure 2.1).
Clergymen and natural philosophers joined forces to reinforce their authority over the uneducated, and to displace older authority figures such as astrologers. God, they insisted, ruled through natural laws, and it was just superstitious rubbish to interpret unusual astronomical phenomena as religious portents. But, convinced that divine significance could be read into unusual events like comets and eclipses, Whiston continued to promote Newton’s own commitment to treating philosophical prediction and biblical prophecy as two sides of the same coin. Delivering lectures that mixed astronomy with the restoration of the Jews to Jerusalem, Whiston toured the country displaying scale models of Moses’ tabernacle and Ezekiel’s temple. He earned a small fortune from lectures and booklets that used detailed mathematical diagrams to predict and explain the total solar eclipse of 1715, but he also regarded unanticipated comets, meteors and unprecedented appearances of the northern lights over London as explicit warnings from God. He managed to secure private as well as public funding for his research into magnetism, but devoted pages of complicated calculations laced with biblical quotations to showing how his measurements of the earth’s changing magnetic patterns confirmed scriptural chronology.29
Probably irked by Newton’s personal repudiation, Whiston attacked Newton’s biblical interpretations. This opposition fanned international interest, and eighteenth-century commentators -including Voltaire and Edward Gibbon – took Newton’s ideas on chronology very seriously. One critic marvelled that the ‘vastness of his Genius extended to every part of Literature . . . he has entred on methods for fixing of Epocha’s never before thought of by others’. Correspondence flowed, and heated arguments took place in coffee houses, private dining rooms and university studies. Thousands of pages were published on Newton’s attempts to redate the expedition of the Argonauts by combining astronomical calculations with analyses of fragmentary Greek poetry. Newton was cited as a biblical and chronological expert by men who are now misleadingly celebrated only as founding fathers of scientific disciplines, such as Joseph Priestley for chemistry and David Hartley for psychology. This one-sided commemoration commits to obscurity many volumes of writings contemporary readers regarded as important.30
For scientific polemicists, Newton’s absorption in such niceties as the alchemical green lion, the seven vials of the angels and cabalistic numerology became embarrassing. These preoccupations had dominated much of Newton’s life, but they detracted from the aura of rationality appropriate for a modern intellectual hero, and during the nineteenth century they became sanitized as ‘relaxations in mature life from hard thinking and investigation’. Hagiographers conveniently glossed over the details of Newton’s anti-Trinitarian beliefs, and instead praised him as a deeply religious man. When David Brewster, Newton’s major nineteenth-century biographer, examined Newton’s correspondence, he reportedly decided that ‘of theological papers, only such will be published as are sufficient to prove that Newton believed strictly in the Trinity’.31
Whiston had singled out for approval those aspects of Newton’s writings that confirmed his own Unitarian insistence in God’s unique holiness, a belief regarded as heretical because it denied the conventional Trinitarian doctrine of God’s threefold nature as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Unitarianism attracted a growing number of adherents. Early members included Priestley, the Birmingham chemist, and also Thomas Jefferson, who greatly admired Newton. He sent to London for a special portrait to hang in his office, used Newtonian mathematics to design a new plough, and rewrote the New Testament by excluding references to Christ’s divinity.32
As British Unitarians became more firmly established in the nineteenth century, they ‘gloried in his [Newton’s] authority, & appropriated him to themselves’. Even those opposed to Unitarianism regarded Newton as an important target: one book was triumphantly subtitled Sir Isaac Newton and the Socinians Foiled. Far from dying out, millenarian prophesy flourished amid the uncertainties of the American and French Revolutions, and modern fundamentalist movements now venerate Newton as a founding father. March of the Reformers, a picture produced by the Seventh Day Adventists, depicts Newton passing on the torch of knowledge from the past to the present. But unlike galleries of scientific innovators where he follows Kepler and Galileo, here Newton heads a line of heroic scriptural interpreters such as John Knox and Martin Luther, leading back to Daniel himself.33
Newton’s Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St John has been repeatedly republished. In 1922, Sir William Whitla, one-time head of the British Medical Association and enthusiastic supporter of the Salvation Army, produced his new edition to counter scriptural scholars who regarded the Bible as a collection of books written by men rather than God. Guided by Newton’s methodology, he explained how Daniel had foretold the then recent occupation of Jerusalem by British troops. The book appeared again as recently as 1991. In his introduction, Arthur Robinson, a modern fundamentalist physicist associated with the environmental movement in Oregon, explained that ‘Like Isaac Newton, I do not know of any verified scientific facts that are inconsistent with the literal truth of every aspect of the Bible.’ Newton has proved particularly valuable for groups whose calculated end of the world has repeatedly failed to materialize, since he maintained that it was impossible to pin down the dates of prophecies precisely. In 1999, the Web still carried a series of calculations reporting that if ‘Newton was correct in his interpretation of Daniel . . . then 1996 or 1997 will be the year of the return of Jesus Christ’!34
Jerusalem is now the home of many of Newton’s manuscripts. This rather surprising location was chosen by the scriptural expert A. S. Yahuda, who shared Newton’s insistence on the Bible’s historical accuracy. Yahuda’s bequest of Newton’s theological manuscripts has enabled scholars to learn far more about Newton’s beliefs and analytical techniques. In 1990, after an American historian pointed out that some of Newton’s interpretations seemed to predict key dates in the formation of modern Israel as a Jewish state, a fundamentalist in Jerusalem telephoned him for further information. Whiston would have approved.
George Cheyne (1671–1743): medical reformer
William Hogarth delighted in visual and verbal double entendres. One good example is his theatrical scene of Conduitt’s drawing room (Figure 2.7), which is saturated with Newtonian imagery. Another is his hallucinatory image of The Weighing House Inn, in which Hogarth punningly plays on gravity, with its dual connotations of physical weight and mental seriousness (Figure 3.2). Hogarth designed this ranked array of levitating intellects for the frontispiece of a humorous pamphlet by John Clubbe, a country rector who, enjoying a local reputation for satire, had elaborated on some lines from Pope’s Dunciad:
Hear you! whose graver heads in equal scales
I weigh, to see whose heaviness prevails;
Attend the trial I propose to make.
Clubbe had suggested that a magnetic weighing machine be set up in every town to ‘prevent great impositions on the publick; for, if the solid contents of every man’s head can thus be come at, every one will know how far he may trust to the understanding of his neighbour’. Choosing the forecourt of an inn, a favourite setting for revealing social transgressions, Hogarth has doubly inverted daily order by dressing the foolish light-headed men in far better clothes than the working men of good sense, who are standing on their heads.35
This picture is sometimes cited to demonstrate how thoroughly Newtonian concepts pervaded eighteenth-century thought. As with many Georgian witticisms, Clubbe’s and Hogarth’s sense of humour now seems rather alien. The failure to appreciate jokes generally betrays profound cultural clashes, and the strangeness of this gravitational caricature highlights some of the ways in which people thought and felt differently from us. Although we have come to demarcate the arts from the sciences, a quarter of a millennium ago the intellectual and emotional world was far less segmented. We give priority to logical, deductive chains of reasoning, but many philosophers argued by analogy from one sphere of experience to another. Language resonated with multiple metaphorical meanings, as single words transported implications from one context to another. The boundaries separating scientific, ethical, economic and religious issues were highly permeable, permitting a fluid interchange that encouraged analogical reasoning, a sort of rational equivalent to the Hogarthian-style visual and verbal puns so relished by learned Augustans.
The physician George Cheyne, who was greatly renowned for his tracts on diet and medicine, shared and also literally embodied Hogarth’s fascination with Newtonian gravity and analogical modes of argument. ‘The learned Doctor Cheyne’ (as he appeared in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones) exemplifies how Newtonian ideas could diagnose bodily, spiritual and social ailments. As his lifestyle vacillated between gregarious gluttony and secluded abstemiousness, his weight swung repeatedly between a ‘Lank, Fleet and Nimble’ 130 lb (59 kg) and an ‘excessively fat, short-breath’d, Lethargic and Lifeless’ 448 lb (204kg).36
These bodily fluctuations corresponded both to his psychological transformations and to his changing attitudes towards Newtonian attraction. Like many of his contemporaries, Cheyne believed that God harmoniously governed His entire creation with simple laws, so that powerful analogies shimmered between the ways in which particles were bonded into matter, individuals cohered in social groups, or souls attained reunion with God. Cheyne’s personal movements between conflicting models of gravity reflected the ambiguity of Newton’s own statements as well as the waxing and waning of competing interpretations during the century.
Newton had bequeathed sketchy and contradictory conjectures about how gravity might operate. The most apparently straightforward of his views, and the one reinforced by the second edition of the Principia that appeared in 1713, held that gravity acts at a distance without any intervening medium. But that hypothesis smacked too much of ancient occult powers, the quasi-magical forces that natural philosophers claimed to have dispelled through their rational approach towards nature. Moreover, many religious believers objected that making particles inherently forceful removed the distinction between inert matter and God’s spiritual power. They preferred to envisage some sort of divine spirit driving a cosmic machine, in which inert particles moved only because they were directly pushed.
As Newton dodged his critics and developed his alchemical ideas, he also investigated the notion of a subtle spiritual aether. To explain phenomena such as optical refraction and electricity, he tentatively suggested that particles might have both repulsive and attractive properties, their influence varying with size. Perhaps, he conjectured, an aetherial fluid made up from tiny repellent particles pervades the whole of space, a medium able to transmit gravity and magnetism, yet one so rare that it scarcely affects the motion of the planets.
Like Newton, Cheyne adopted different models. Initially, he made divine attraction analogous to the central tug of gravitation. But later, he compared spiritual power with the short-range forces that bind particles together into matter, describing people as reflections of God, ‘diminutive analogical Particles’ whose pull towards each other paralleled the attraction drawing them towards Him.37 By the end of Cheyne’s life, as natural philosophers constantly reinterpreted Newton’s ideas, many of them had come to share his focus on aethers made up of small particles as the medium of attraction.
Like Whiston, Cheyne was a mathematical millenarian and an early Newtonian who was later rejected by Newton himself. But there the similarities end. Far from being ridiculed, his enormously successful books on dietary regimes and the ills of English society made him somewhat of a cult figure. In contrast with the mainly Low Church Whig leanings of the Boyle lecturers, Cheyne belonged to a small group of predominantly Tory Scottish Episcopalians. They clustered around two distinguished Edinburgh academics, David Gregory and Archibald Pitcairne, ambitious Newtonian proselytizers whose careers were shadowed by their Jacobite leanings. With Newton’s help, Gregory managed to flee to a safe professorship at Oxford, which had been staunchly Royalist during the Civil War and remained a Tory stronghold well into the nineteenth century.38 Cheyne himself emigrated to London in 1701, but continued to divide his energies between the mysticism, mathematics and medicine he had absorbed in Scotland, a heady mixture whose inherent compatibilities subsequently dominated his conflicted life.
Although Cheyne never did write his proposed Mathematical Principles of Theoretical Medicine (yet another Principia!), he was one of the earliest popularizers of Newton’s theories of attraction. His first book, on fevers, defended what Pitcairne labelled ‘iatromathematics’, an influential school of thought that flourished until the 1730s. Satirically dubbed ‘the Art of Curing Diseases by the Mathematicks’, this Newtonian approach to medicine and physiology searched for the facts of life in the short-range attractive forces between particles of matter. It was one version of the new mechanical models of the body that natural philosophers had been introducing as they adopted a quantitative and experimental approach to physiology.
Traditional physicians retained a more holistic view. Drawing no firm distinction between bodily and spiritual ailments, they believed that people’s behaviour and health were governed by the balance of four humours. In contrast, the iatromathematicians conceived the body as a hydraulic system filled with moving fluids whose behaviour could be explained by using Newtonian mathematics. As Cheyne explained, ‘the Human Body is a Machin of an infinite Number and Variety of different Channels and Pipes, filled with various and different Liquors and Fluids, perpetually running, glideing, or creeping forward, or returning backward, in a constant Circle’.39
Cheyne continued to publish Newtonian books on mathematics and medicine after he came to London, but things soon started going disastrously wrong. He effectively ostracized himself from the Royal Society by antagonizing Newton and his supporters, who accused him of plagiarism and mathematical incompetence. Renouncing his former abstemious industriousness, over the next few years Cheyne ate and drank himself to breaking point. As he later chastised himself, because he frequented coffee houses and taverns to drum up medical business he over-indulged in ‘luxury, gluttony, and upper-class vice without exercise’, constantly ‘taking snuff out of a ponderous gold box’. At the age of thirty-five, weighing 440 lb (200 kg), scarcely able to let go of ‘the Posts of my Bed, for fear of tumbling out’ and convinced that he was about to die, he withdrew to the country. There he resolved to purify his body with purges, emetics and a strict vegetarian regime, and to cleanse his soul through spiritual reflection and religious reading.40
Probably under Whiston’s guidance, as Cheyne ruminated in his rural retreat, he came to see his own restoration to health as a divine sign that he should help to establish the New Jerusalem in England. No longer drawn by London society and luxurious living, he experienced a cosmic force that pulled him towards God just as gravity bound the planets to the sun. God, he explained to his readers, had imbued living creatures with ‘a central Tendency towards Himself, an Essential Principle of Reunion with Himself, Analogous to this principle now mention’d [gravity] in the Great Bodies of the Universe’. Like comets disturbing the regular motion of the solar system, so too ‘earthly and sensual Attractions . . . destroy the beautiful progress of spiritual Beings, towards the Centre and End of their being’.41 While Cheyne argued by analogy to translate Newton’s laws of gravitational attraction from the physical universe to the moral one, his own weight diminished as he rid his body and his soul of impurities.
In 1709, Cheyne felt ready to face the world and resume his medical practice in Bath. But for the next fourteen years, although he was busily disseminating his new concepts of attraction, continuing his religious studies and publishing books on healthy living, he struggled incessantly against consuming temptations. Periodic stints of vegetables and medicinal waters proved insufficient to counter his alcoholic calorie intake, and his weight escalated until a servant had to follow him with a stool so that he could recuperate every few yards. Medical treatment often lags behind physiological theories, and although Cheyne had endorsed Newtonian iatromathematics, he prescribed older therapeutic techniques of dietary regulation. With the help of a lettuce-and-wine regime he eventually managed to move into a more settled final phase of his life. Still pursuing his religious introspection, he shrank to a third of his former mass, probably encouraged by the huge success of his controversial books about personal well-being and the health of the English nation. Cheyne became a fashionable physician who dispensed medical and moral prescriptions to aristocratic women and some of the country’s most famous men – writers like David Hume, Samuel Richardson and Alexander Pope.
