Newton, page 11
Cheyne was one of the first of Newton’s successors to explore aether models, which became increasingly prevalent from around 1740. Interpretations varied enormously, largely because as the mediators between matter, motion and spirit, aetherial fluids carried huge theological implications. Relying on arguments that ranged from the ineffably vague to the extraordinarily convoluted, natural philosophers described weightless invisible fluids of subtle particles seeping through the pores of solids, forcing gases to expand, and cushioning the sun in a great repellent cloud whose graduating density maintained the planets in their appropriate orbits. Often authenticated by the adjective ‘Newtonian’, aethers proliferated and diversified as authors with very different religious commitments summoned them up to explain mysterious phenomena like electrical charge, magnetic repulsion, or human memory.42
Cheyne’s interest in investigating how Newton’s ideas could cast light on human behaviour was widely shared. By far the most influential of his successors was David Hartley, an ardent proponent of Newtonian aethers. Although he wrote extensively on the millenarian beliefs he shared with Newton and Whiston, Hartley became widely celebrated for his psychological innovations. Like Cheyne, he was an intensely religious physician who argued analogically and sought to embrace physical and moral realms within a single philosophy. Set out in numbered propositions like the Principia, Hartley’s famous Observations on Man (1749) covers the physical causes of itching, yawning and sexual arousal as well as life’s moral pains and pleasures. According to Priestley, Hartley threw ‘more useful light upon the theory of the mind than Newton did upon the theory of the natural world’, while Coleridge expressed his enthusiasm by naming his son Hartley.43
Just as Cheyne had converted Newton’s mathematics into hydraulic physiology, Hartley elaborated one of his speculations in the Opticks into an aetherial model of the nervous system. Light falling on the eye might, Newton had suggested, set up vibrations that travel along the nerves to the brain. Hartley envisaged human brains and nerves as filled with a subtle fluid that transmits signals from one part of the body to another. An external stimulus – such as pain, smell or sexual desire – causes characteristic vibrations in this internal aether, which give rise to specific responses in the brain. By combining this physical model derived from Newton with contemporary arguments that ideas become associated in people’s minds when they occur close together, Hartley provided new ways to think about free will, ethics and biology.
Hartley’s associationism, as his ideas came to be called, had a huge impact on theories about physiology, psychology and evolution, and also on moral philosophy. In economics, Adam Smith was arguing that individual profit could be compatible with public wealth. Analogically, Hartley described psychological and physiological checking mechanisms that enabled people driven by self-interest to participate in mutually beneficial social enterprises. In other words, he made personal satisfaction compatible with the greatest public happiness – the ultimate goal of the English utilitarians who followed him.
Observations on Man was enormously influential in France, where Newtonian principles came to govern the biological and moral realms as well as the physical universe. Focusing on the social implications of Hartley’s work, leading philosophers such as Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and the Marquis de Condorcet constantly referred to Newton’s innovations as they tried to deduce general laws describing human behaviour and morality. In parallel endeavours, men of science like Georges Buffon (who gazed for inspiration at the portrait of Newton above his desk) continued Cheyne’s and Hartley’s quest to regulate the living world with Newtonian laws of physics. ‘Let us render homage to Newton,’ urged one of France’s leading medical researchers in 1801, the ‘first to discover the secret of the Creator, viz. a simplicity of causes reconciled with a multiplicity of effects.’44
John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744):
entrepreneurial lecturer
In Hogarth’s picture of Conduitt’s Newtonian drawing room, a short, stocky clergyman with his back to the audience peers into the play’s text to prompt the childish actors (Figure 2.7). John Theophilus Desaguliers appears here as Newton’s protégé, a man of reason maintaining Augustan order amidst frivolous revelry. But Hogarth was not always so gentle. His audiences inside and outside this conversation piece knew that in other performances, this sombre off-stage assistant paraded in ceremonial splendour as one of the country’s leading Freemasons. In savage caricatures, Hogarth portrayed Desaguliers as a myopic preacher boring a lascivious clergyman and a dozing congregation, and as an old woman baring her buttocks in a Masonic procession.45
Despite gaining international eminence both as Grand Master of the newly founded Grand Lodge of England and as Fellow of the Royal Society, Desaguliers had a hard life. A refugee from religious persecution (as a toddler he had been smuggled to safety in a barrel), he struggled incessantly to support his family. Scientific inventors had not yet carved out what would prove to be one of their most valuable inventions: the scientific career. Frustrated at feeling himself the Royal Society’s hired servant, Desaguliers constantly supplemented his meagre salary with a variety of speculative ventures in publishing, engineering and lecturing. He converted his house into a boarding school, but was forced to leave when it was demolished to make way for Westminster Bridge, even though he had been one of the consultants employed on this massive project. Like many corpulent Georgian gentlemen, Desaguliers suffered from chronic gout (most probably turning for advice to Cheyne’s best-selling self-help manual), and he died in poverty at his lodgings in Covent Garden.
Although an easy target for Hogarth’s wit, Desaguliers was an enterprising and well-educated man, equally at home in French, English or Latin. As he manoeuvred among churches and coffee houses, lodges and lecture theatres, this philosophical engineer developed new machines but also engineered new sources of income. His role in promoting Newtonian ideas was singularly important, yet he also typifies the new spirit of commercial enterprise that was developing in the first half of the eighteenth century. Countless contemporaries were learning to rely on their intelligence rather than their inheritance, and their individual entrepreneurial activities contributed to establishing science as a worthwhile practical enterprise. Gowin Knight, for instance, was a doctor from an impoverished provincial family who cornered the naval market in compasses, wrote a Newtonian book about attraction and repulsion, and became the first director of the British Museum; James Ferguson acquired almost mythical status as a Scottish autodidactic astronomer who built up a flourishing instrument trade. Simultaneously benefiting from and contributing to Britain’s booming economy, such self-made men collectively consolidated public approval of Newtonian natural philosophy.46
Desaguliers was only seven when he arrived in London, one of the Huguenots forced to emigrate in 1685 after Louis XIV revoked French anti-discriminatory legislation. Unenthusiastic about following his father into the Church, as an Oxford undergraduate Desaguliers initiated his Newtonian career by translating French engineering books and attending the extra-curricular experimental demonstrations being run by John Keill. This Scottish High Church mathematician, sneered at as ‘Newton’s toady’, belonged to the same circle as Cheyne and spearheaded Newton’s challenge to the English educational system; however, despite Keill’s innovations, Oxford remained committed to Aristotelian philosophy long after Cambridge was teaching Newtonian physics. Keill probably smoothed Desaguliers’s path as he insinuated himself into the competitive, commercial world of London lecturing, where he too became renowned as an ardent Newtonian propagandist.
Newton made a wise decision when he agreed to sponsor Desaguliers and secure his rapid promotion to become the Royal Society’s experimental demonstrator in 1716. An energetic writer, lecturer and international traveller, Desaguliers became the most influential early propagator of Newtonian ideology amongst the international scholarly community as well as a broader public. Constantly negotiating between different social networks, he brought Newton to huge audiences, both through his own work and also indirectly through his former students, several of whom themselves became influential educators.
Benefiting from his practical skills, Desaguliers excelled at inventing apparatus specifically devised to demonstrate Newtonian principles, and his experimental demonstrations proved extraordinarily convincing. Whereas Newton had prudently cloaked his more controversial suggestions under the guise of speculation, Desaguliers confidently claimed that the Opticks contained a ‘vast Fund of Philosophy; which (tho’ he has modestly delivered under the Name of Queries, as if they were only Conjectures) daily Experiments and Observations confirm’.47 Thus as Desaguliers defended, interpreted and developed Newton’s suggestions, he enabled Newton’s own vacillations to be conveniently overlooked and made his philosophy more palatable by imbuing it with the simple certainty of truth.
The roll-call of his children’s aristocratic godparents testifies to Desaguliers’s expertise in the art of cultivating patronage, so essential for survival in the cut-thrust metropolitan world. He pursued several lines of contact simultaneously. Assiduously securing Newton’s favours at the Royal Society, he also took advantage of his theological training to obtain Church posts from aristocratic and royal backers, while Masonic ceremonies offered profitable encounters with wealthy gentlemen eager to invest in engineering projects. For twenty-five years, his most valuable patron was James Brydges (later the Duke of Chandos), owner of a large estate in Middlesex. In a symbiotic relationship that soured sadly as Desaguliers neglected his religious duties, Chandos offered salaried clerical sinecures in exchange for improvements to his property and technical advice on his risky financial ventures.
Desaguliers’s allegorical poem The Newtonian System – which could aptly be retitled The Patronage System – illustrates his oily diplomatic expertise. He composed it to celebrate George II’s coronation in 1727, the year of Newton’s death, but dedicated it with blatant flattery to the new Queen Caroline, hoping that she would continue to employ him as her experimental entertainer. Deftly interweaving praise for Newton’s ‘tow’ring Genius’, English freedom and royal splendour, Desaguliers patriotically twinned Newtonian astronomical certainty with Hanoverian stability, tactfully not mentioning that the new King had been over thirty when he arrived in his adopted country, and was not even fluent in his subjects’ language. Unlike the French regime that ruled by fear and was subject to the turbulent ‘Whims of the Cartesian scheme’, the British King – enthused Desaguliers – resembled the sun, tranquilly extending the power of love over a nation of free citizens:
That Sol self-pois’d in Aether does reside,
And thence exerts his Virtue far and wide;
Like Ministers attending e’ery Glance,
Six Worlds sweep round his Throne in Mystick Dance . . .
ATTRACTION now in all the Realm is seen
To bless the Reign of GEORGE and CAROLINE.48
Embellished with didactic notes, astronomical diagrams and advertisements for his lecture courses, Desaguliers’s Newtonian System was just one of the numerous poems published throughout the century that simultaneously reinforced Newton’s reputation as an English genius, consolidated national familiarity with the tenets of Newtonian natural philosophy, and promoted their authors’ diverse interests. In Desaguliers’s case, the diplomatic strategy worked. He was soon appointed Chaplain to Frederick, the new Prince of Wales, regularly visiting Kew to give him private lectures in natural philosophy, and, a decade later, presided over the ceremony initiating him as a Freemason.
Desaguliers’s salary at the Royal Society was tied to his productivity, which goes some way towards explaining his prolific publication record of over fifty papers in the Philosophical Transactions. These covered a huge range of topics. While Newton was still alive, Desaguliers sensibly dedicated most of his energies to defending contested items of Newtonian doctrine. For instance, he acted as Newton’s Parisian ambassador, refuting French criticisms about Newton’s optical experiments and countering claims that Newton had been wrong to describe the earth as being flattened at the poles (French expeditions to settle this prolonged debate eventually proved Newton to be right, a key conclusion encouraging the continental spread of Newtonian ideas).
But after Newton died, Desaguliers was freer to pursue his own inclinations, and in his later articles took Newtonian ideology in new directions. He was particularly interested in exploring the suggestions Newton had put forward in the Opticks about the attractive and repulsive forces between particles. Initially he focused on investigating how gases expand and contract, a topic in which he had gained huge practical expertise with his machines designed to rid city air of its noxious ‘fuliginous vapours, arising from innumerable coal fires, and stenches from filthy lay-stalls and sewers . . . in the country a serene dry constitution of the air is more exhilarating than a moist thick air’.49
He also leaped on to the most fashionable philosophical bandwagon – electricity. Machines that generated static electrical charges had originated as by-products of Newton’s research into glass, and literally shocked Enlightenment men and women into a surge of enthusiasm for spectacular natural philosophy. At dinner parties, gentlemen set ladies’ drinks on fire with their electrified swords or thrilled to exciting kisses from the lips of a charged-up Venus. In lecture theatres, performing philosophers attracted feathers from the floor with the hands of electrified orphans suspended by ropes from the ceiling. Throughout Europe, learned scholars were as fascinated as everyone else by this exciting new phenomenon. In his prize-winning book, published in French as well as English, Desaguliers advertised the value of a Newtonian interpretation.
Through his theoretical discussions of gases and electricity, Desaguliers contributed to the debates among Newton’s followers that resulted in the general adoption of aether theories after about 1740. However, his practical expertise also promoted Newtonian ideas. Desaguliers dispensed advice on improving Edinburgh’s water-supply problems, ventilating the stuffy House of Commons, importing chemicals from Africa, exploiting Scottish pine forests – indeed, there were few problems of eighteenth-century life that he failed to tackle. He endeared himself to his wealthy private patrons by curing their smoky chimneys, heating their draughty houses and pumping water out of their mines. At the same time, he impressed the Fellows at the Royal Society and the students at his lecture courses by converting the working models of these engineering schemes into Newtonian experiments.
Profit and natural philosophy went hand in hand. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift satirized this opportunistic entanglement by giving his Academy of Lagado, that acid critique of the Royal Society, the physical dimensions of the Royal Exchange. Like other entrepreneurial inventors, Desaguliers became involved in bitter and costly patent disputes because he was as interested in marketing his barometers, hydrometers and other philosophical instruments as in their potential to yield new information about the world. Drawing on his research experience, Desaguliers advised the City investors he met at Masonic meetings about their speculative projects in soap manufacturing, mining and brewing. Ambitious sponsors employed Desaguliers to install ornamental fountains in their country estates, or organize impressive firework performances as ostentatious evidence of their wealth and status. Inevitably, things didn’t always run smoothly: on one occasion, the rockets that should have shot up out of the Thames to explode dramatically in the sky went astray and blew a hole in the bottom of a nearby barge carrying spectators, who had to be ignominiously rowed ashore.
As Desaguliers travelled round Britain, France and Holland on Masonic missions, lecturing tours and engineering site trips, his wife was also experiencing some of the harsher aspects of Georgian life. Like so many philosophical partners, little evidence survives of Joanna Desaguliers’s existence, but five of her seven children died in infancy, and she presumably bore the responsibility of caring for the paying boarders who attended her husband’s courses (and who, one wonders, took over when he was laid up every winter with his chronic gout?). Although we can now only speculate about wifely contributions to the consolidation of Newtonian ideologies, these invisible assistants undoubtedly performed countless mundane chores.
In addition to the sick babies and students, Desaguliers’s cramped house in Westminster must have been overflowing with his apparatus – instruments in various stages of completion, piles of unsold books, and bulky demonstration equipment that included an eight-foot wide centrifugal bellows and a working steam-engine. Desaguliers was particularly proud of his large mechanical planetarium, which he claimed displayed the movement of the planets round the sun far more accurately than ornate orreries like the one portrayed in Wright of Derby’s picture (Figure 1.4).
The lectures, books and apparatus that were generated in this squashed household did far more to consolidate a Europe-wide Newtonian ideology than the learned disquisitions emanating from the Royal Society. In 1734, as Desaguliers embarked on his 121st course of lectures, he boasted that of the dozen or so other experimental lecturers in the world, eight had been those whom he had taught. One of them, Stephen Demainbray, later became the custodian of George III’s astronomical observatory at Kew. His impressive demonstration equipment, much of it similar to Desaguliers’s own, has been preserved and can now be seen in London’s Science Museum.50
From a Newtonian perspective, the most influential of Desaguliers’s former students was Willem ’sGravesande, who became a professor at Leiden, one of Europe’s leading universities. Uniting optics, astronomy and mechanics in a single book, ’sGravesande made Newton’s mathematics accessible by making it experimentally visible. Taking advantage of traditional Dutch woodworking skills, he devised demonstration equipment to display mechanical and optical principles with clever devices – a cone that appears to run uphill, a shadowy monster’s head projected on to a wall, a miniature tower that tips over. Restyled in metal and plastic, some of these are now marketed as executive toys with appealing names, such as Newton’s cradle. Ironically, thanks to Desaguliers’s English translation, this modified Dutch Newtonianism was exported back into England where it dominated English teaching for many years.
