Newton, page 15
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.46
Keats had evidently been thinking about rainbow imagery for some time. Three years earlier, drinking at a dinner hosted by Benjamin Haydon, he had agreed with the ‘excessively merry and witty, . . . and tipsey’ essayist Charles Lamb that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’. The revellers’ toast to ‘Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics’ has often been cited as the slogan of a supposed Romantic anti-Newtonian movement. However, even taking this cheerful mockery at face value, there was no simple party line of opposition to Newton or to science. Blake is frequently held up as the epitome of Romantic scientific hostility, yet even his rainbows are firmly Newtonian ones. At this celebrated dinner, Newton only entered the conversation in the first place because Haydon was allocating him a favoured spot in his still unfinished painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, which hung above the drinkers. In what would become his most famous picture, Haydon deliberately contrasted a sneering, atheistic Voltaire with the man ‘whose intellect in its range almost reached the outermost circle of the influence of Divinity . . . Newton, who was a Believer’.47
Wordsworth obligingly laughed along with the other guests, but spent over thirty years working on his lines about Newton’s statue in Trinity College chapel. Coleridge, Wordsworth’s poetic mentor, echoed Goethe’s conviction that Newton was wrong to believe in the possibility of objective, detached observation: ‘Mind, in his system, is always passive, – a lazy Looker-on on an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image . . . there is ground for suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.’48
Wordsworth tried out different ways of rendering poetically how he himself, like Goethe and the German self-experimenters, was involved in the act of perception. In The Prelude, he imagined looking down from his room in St John’s towards Newton’s statue in the antechapel of Trinity, the adjacent College. He rejected attempts that incorporated himself, deleting phrases such as ‘And from my pillow’ or ‘pressing on my sight’. Instead, Wordsworth eventually decided to retain the plain disengaged ‘I’ as solitary beholder. His final version evokes the concept of Newtonian detached vision:
. . . I could behold
The Antichapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton with his prism, & silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging throu’ strange seas of Thought, alone.49
5
FRANCE
From the fact that the action and reaction of opposing powers is always equal, the greatest efforts of the Goddess of Reason against Christianity were made in France.
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1797)
Promoting Newton in Europe could be a hazardous business. In Italy, Francesco Algarotti’s Newton for the Ladies was placed on the Vatican’s Index of banned books, and Paolo Frisi risked censure by contrasting Galileo’s persecution with Newton’s celebration.1 Frisi was one of the numerous European philosophers who held England up as the land of liberty in order to criticize other regimes, so that debates about natural philosophy were fraught with political and religious implications. In order to convince French readers that Newton should supplant Descartes, Voltaire was obliged to publish in Amsterdam and London, while Jean Delisle de Sales was imprisoned for the materialist views he expressed in his Philosophy of Nature.
Like other best-sellers that circulated secretly in Enlightenment France, Delisle de Sales’s Philosophy of Nature was published abroad, and appeared in small pocket-size volumes that were convenient for clandestine reading. In his controversial book, Delisle de Sales included a short play about Newton in which he satirized contemporary discussions about faith and reason. For the dramatic opening scene, Newton (who in real life never even travelled as far as Oxford) is perched by the coast in Senegal, taking time off from checking his calculations of the tides to contemplate the grandeur of nature (Figure 5.1). The plot hinges on Newton being a vegetarian who intervenes in various dialogues between a merman, an oyster and a native African about whether or not they should eat each other. Newton, here set up as an icon of rationality, concludes that only the African is worth teaching, since his perception of God as a cockchafer does at least indicate that he can acquire a human soul.2
For modern readers, the humour of a play that could be broadly summarized by the Cartesian quip ‘I eat, therefore I think’ appears somewhat strained. However, Delisle de Sales was not the only author who imaginatively incorporated Newton within settings that strike us as bizarre, but which made serious comments on profound philosophical issues. For instance, in 1748, Denis Diderot, one of the two major editors of the Encyclopédie, published an erotic novel, The Indiscreet Jewels (perhaps he regretted this venture the following year when he was arrested for producing seditious literature). French aristocrats snapped up copies of what turned out to be Diderot’s most popular work, which metaphorically vaunted female sexuality as well as Enlightenment rationality. Eager purchasers evidently relished the pornographic wit articulated by the ‘jewels’ (sexual organs) of gossiping women, but they also appreciated Diderot’s subversive, thinly veiled references to prominent figures in the French establishment, including the King. In one chapter, Newton features in a sultan’s dream about the phallic rise (and collapse) of science. Another scene is set at the Academy of Banzo, where Circino, the Newtonian philosopher of attraction, engages his Cartesian rival in a debating duel, significantly conducted under the light of the full moon.3
Finding Newton in under-the-counter literature comes as rather a shock, but by the middle of the eighteenth century he had become a cultural figurehead well outside academic circles. Delisle de Sales’s spell in prison indicates how dangerous materialist philosophies were perceived to be. On the other hand, that Diderot should use Newton to spice up soft pornography illustrates to what extent philosophical controversy was a popular topic of conversation. Newton’s rise to iconic status depended not only on the direct propagation of his ideas in elite intellectual texts, but also on his frequent appearances in a huge range of poems and pictures, books and buildings. Using extravagant language, French poets celebrated Newton as a ‘tow’ring genius . . . Sagacious! comprehensive! and sublime!’. More pithily, a facetious society gossip reported that ‘One may see Lawyers forsake the Bar to busy themselves in the study of Attraction, and Divines neglect their Theological exercises for its sake.’4
By the end of the century, this English hero had become the French God of Reason. This was far from being a straightforward process. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, Frenchmen argued about the validity of some aspects of Newton’s theories right through the eighteenth century. For one thing, chauvinistic interests dominated the acceptance of philosophical systems. In a letter to a French colleague, an English mathematician regretted the universal ‘Tyranny of Prejudice’ affecting ‘even the most zealous and industrious Searchers after Truth . . . We have our Newton, the Germans their Leibniz, and you your Descartes.’5
Long after Newton’s optical ideas had been broadly accepted, eminent natural philosophers rejected his concept of gravitational attraction, and many of them never agreed with various aspects of his work. But different theories were gradually cut and pasted together to create new syntheses in a Lego-like approach to constructing models of the universe. By the end of the century, French people who thought of themselves as Newtonian were in reality imbibing and disseminating an international blend of Newtonian, Cartesian and Leibnizian approaches to nature.
Reactions to Newton’s ideas were strongly affected by religious debates. Most controversially, the Baron d’Holbach relied on Newtonian principles in his System of Nature of 1770. Perceived as hugely threatening, this notorious yet influential manifesto of Enlightenment materialism was not translated into English for almost a century. D’Holbach horrified many readers (including those who had not opened the book) by denying the existence of the human soul. He argued that people are made solely from matter, so their behaviour must be entirely governed by mechanical laws. Claiming that the basic urge driving human behaviour is self-preservation, d’Holbach reformulated Newton’s first law of motion: ‘Newton calls it force of inertia, moralists have called it in man self-love . . . This gravitation is thus a necessary disposition in man and in all beings, who . . . tend to persevere in the existence they have received, as long as nothing disturbs the order of their machine or its primitive tendency.’6
Often pointing to d’Holbach’s book, devout Catholics bracketed Newton, Descartes and Leibniz together, fearing that any natural philosophy posed a threat to religious belief. Even towards the end of the century, several contradictory positions thrived at the same time, because Newton could be reinterpreted to suit different theological interpretations. Most Jesuits denounced Newton as an atheist and a materialist who had constructed a Godless universe. But other experts enlisted Newton on the opposite side, insisting that his orderly cosmos proved the existence of a divine architect. This was, for instance, the position that the elderly Voltaire came to defend.7
But despite these scientific and religious debates, Newton was converted into an iconic figurehead. As part of their rationalizing propaganda, Enlightenment philosophers held him up as a shining exemplar of the invaluable contributions that scientific knowledge could make to social progress. The Encyclopédie’s introduction, often taken as the defining manifesto of Enlightenment thought, gave pride of place to Newton, celebrating him as the century’s leading genius who, supplanting Descartes, had ‘appeared at last, and gave philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep’.8 Because gravity could be praised as a democratic force that affected everyone equally, Newton became a hero for Revolutionary citoyens (citizens). But at the same time, he remained ‘le chevalier anglais (the English knight)’, leader of a new intellectual aristocracy.
Renowned for his mathematical approach to nature and his work on optics, Newton personified the two major preoccupations of French Enlightenment philosophers – reason and vision. The very term Enlightenment conjured up the strong bonds between seeing and knowing, between lucidity and rationality, an ocular paradigm that ruled particularly strongly in France. French writers, architects and artists played with multiply punning imagery of mental and optical illumination, of cosmological and terrestrial order. Rays from the Sun King had shone over but also controlled his subjects, while the Masonic all-seeing eye so prevalent in Revolutionary iconography indicated God’s omniscience. Similarly, Newton had wielded a prism to analyse the light of God, and had focused his mind to deduce how gravity bound His universe together.9
Pursuing this optical metaphor, the Encyclopédie placed ‘the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast labyrinth [of human knowledge], where he can perceive the principal sciences and arts simultaneously’. Poets expressed the same image more lyrically. As they hymned Newton’s celestial vision and power, they often gave him the piercing gaze of a high-flying eagle, traditional symbol of a genius’s sight, or transformed him into a spirit roaming the heavens. French poetry of this period does not enjoy a good reputation. Modern readers do not relish long poems whose dedications start:
O SHINING SPIRIT! . . .
To thee, whose eye sounded the depths of the universe,
Great shade of Newton, I address my verses!
Nevertheless, such tributes played a vital role in consolidating Newton’s fame and confirming the semi-divine status that he was acquiring.10
Well before the end of the century, it had become perfectly consistent to praise Newton as a genius and yet disagree profoundly with aspects of his philosophy. How could an English natural philosopher, whose theories were never fully accepted, be lauded as a semi-divine genius under a French egalitarian regime? One way of resolving such apparent paradoxes is to consider that Newton became fêted not so much as an individual in his own right, but rather as a transcendent entity, an abstract idealization, so that pictures, poems and buildings represented not Newton himself, but the concepts of reason, order and genius that he came to personify.
Voltaire’s presence looms so strongly that he is often credited with having brought Newton to the French people almost single-handedly, but Newton’s renown travelled along numerous other routes. His elevation to international glory was unique. Our understanding of why and how this happened is greatly enriched by looking at some of the commemorative statues, poems and buildings that reached people who held no deep knowledge of gravity or optics, but whose sentiments affected the conduct of science.
Displacing Descartes
One of the more contrived jokes circulating among French wits concerned a Newtonian and a Cartesian who had a fight. Because the Newtonian lacked any repulsive force, he fell to the ground when the Cartesian’s fist was attracted to his centre instead of being deflected in a circle.11 But even sophisticated commentators reduced the complex French debates about natural philosophy into a power struggle between two adversaries.
Like Newton, Descartes was a national figurehead who carried great symbolic importance even for those who had only a scanty knowledge of his theories. For years both heroes coexisted – sometimes joined by Leibniz and Euler – as icons of modern progress. But as science and philosophy gradually became separate academic disciplines, Newton became heralded as a scientific founding father who had superseded his French predecessor. Descartes, on the other hand, was placed in the philosophical canon, so that although his research in mathematics and experimental physics came to seem less significant, he retained his heroic status.
Shortly after Newton’s funeral, Voltaire provided an instantly quotable contrast:
A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else. He has left the world full, he finds it empty. In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind . . . For your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation . . .
Writing in political exile, Voltaire was keen to make France seem reactionary in comparison with libertarian England, and he emphasized that Newton was the greatest man who had ever lived because he governed by truth rather than violence.12
In his funeral eulogy to Newton, the distinguished French philosopher Bernard de la Fontenelle offended sensibilities on both sides of the Channel by bracketing him with Descartes. Both of them, he told the horrified Paris Academy of Sciences, were geniuses. Immediately published in French and English, Fontenelle’s tribute to an English hero caused a minor European sensation: Charles-Louis Montesquieu even demanded that copies be couriered out as gifts for his hosts in Vienna. Conduitt, who had provided Fontenelle with many biographical details, later complained that he had not done ‘justice to that great man who had eclipsed the glory of their hero Descartes’, but victory was neither as swift nor as total as Conduitt claimed to believe.13 Even Fontenelle warned his audience not to succumb to the temptation of believing in attraction, and although at mid-century the Encyclopédie insisted that Cartesianism had been banished from France, this bold assertion was itself an exaggerated advertisement for Newtonian ideas.
Far from being a palace coup, Newton’s succession was slow, patchy and complicated. In the 1670s, his early work on optics had initially met with a cool reception. Intrigued yet sceptical researchers found they could not replicate his results, so that Newton gained the reputation in French academic circles of being a brilliant mathematician but a ham-fisted experimenter. Convincing confirmation only came some forty years later, when Desaguliers redesigned many of Newton’s original experiments. Fortunately for Newton’s international renown, natural philosophers converged on London in 1715, ostensibly to celebrate the Hanoverian King’s accession to the throne, but more probably to witness a total solar eclipse. Fanning foreign enthusiasm with diplomatic gifts and dinner invitations, Newton and his allies ensured that the visitors carried experimental instructions back home, and also encouraged the publication of a handsome Parisian edition of the Opticks.
Meanwhile, the Principia had not gained many European adherents. Among the few readers competent to judge it, most agreed that while Newton had produced an inspired mathematical hypothesis, it bore little relationship to physical reality. But during the 1730s, dogmatic resistance started to soften. It was a Jesuit priest, a self-taught disciple of Descartes called Nicolas Malebranche, who first convinced loyal Cartesians to incorporate some elements of Newton’s ideas into their own world view. Although Malebranche and his admirers never did relinquish their swirling vortices of particles, they were won over to Newton’s laws of gravitation. This partial acceptance paved the way for the more militant Newtonian revisionists who succeeded them.14
But outside narrow academic circles, an ambitious young mathematician called Pierre Maupertuis played a far more dramatic role in persuading the French nation to embrace English cosmology. Already the author of an explicitly Newtonian book on astronomy, Maupertuis was an inspired self-publicist whose rise to fame had as much to do with his skill at convincing different factions of his expertise as with his experimental results. Maupertuis benefited from the revival of an old debate, one which provided the grounds for Voltaire to quip that ‘In Paris you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides.’15 Cartesians envisaged the earth as being slightly compressed round its middle, while according to Newton, it should be flattened at the poles.
The French Academy of Sciences decided to resolve the issue by sending teams to Peru and Lapland during the 1730s. On paper, comparing measurements taken as near as possible to the Equator and the North Pole sounds like a simple way of distinguishing conclusively between these competing theoretical positions, but the real-life situation was, inevitably, far more complex. The adventurous explorers were relatively inexperienced, cosseted young gentlemen who suddenly had to contend with extremes of temperature and terrain, while in Paris, experts argued from the comfort of their drawing rooms about the best type of instrument to use, and the validity of the measurements. Far from being neutral arbitrators, members of both camps had made up their minds in advance what the answer would be: personal reputations and national pride were at stake in this supposedly scientific contest.
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.46
Keats had evidently been thinking about rainbow imagery for some time. Three years earlier, drinking at a dinner hosted by Benjamin Haydon, he had agreed with the ‘excessively merry and witty, . . . and tipsey’ essayist Charles Lamb that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’. The revellers’ toast to ‘Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics’ has often been cited as the slogan of a supposed Romantic anti-Newtonian movement. However, even taking this cheerful mockery at face value, there was no simple party line of opposition to Newton or to science. Blake is frequently held up as the epitome of Romantic scientific hostility, yet even his rainbows are firmly Newtonian ones. At this celebrated dinner, Newton only entered the conversation in the first place because Haydon was allocating him a favoured spot in his still unfinished painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, which hung above the drinkers. In what would become his most famous picture, Haydon deliberately contrasted a sneering, atheistic Voltaire with the man ‘whose intellect in its range almost reached the outermost circle of the influence of Divinity . . . Newton, who was a Believer’.47
Wordsworth obligingly laughed along with the other guests, but spent over thirty years working on his lines about Newton’s statue in Trinity College chapel. Coleridge, Wordsworth’s poetic mentor, echoed Goethe’s conviction that Newton was wrong to believe in the possibility of objective, detached observation: ‘Mind, in his system, is always passive, – a lazy Looker-on on an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image . . . there is ground for suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.’48
Wordsworth tried out different ways of rendering poetically how he himself, like Goethe and the German self-experimenters, was involved in the act of perception. In The Prelude, he imagined looking down from his room in St John’s towards Newton’s statue in the antechapel of Trinity, the adjacent College. He rejected attempts that incorporated himself, deleting phrases such as ‘And from my pillow’ or ‘pressing on my sight’. Instead, Wordsworth eventually decided to retain the plain disengaged ‘I’ as solitary beholder. His final version evokes the concept of Newtonian detached vision:
. . . I could behold
The Antichapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton with his prism, & silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging throu’ strange seas of Thought, alone.49
5
FRANCE
From the fact that the action and reaction of opposing powers is always equal, the greatest efforts of the Goddess of Reason against Christianity were made in France.
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1797)
Promoting Newton in Europe could be a hazardous business. In Italy, Francesco Algarotti’s Newton for the Ladies was placed on the Vatican’s Index of banned books, and Paolo Frisi risked censure by contrasting Galileo’s persecution with Newton’s celebration.1 Frisi was one of the numerous European philosophers who held England up as the land of liberty in order to criticize other regimes, so that debates about natural philosophy were fraught with political and religious implications. In order to convince French readers that Newton should supplant Descartes, Voltaire was obliged to publish in Amsterdam and London, while Jean Delisle de Sales was imprisoned for the materialist views he expressed in his Philosophy of Nature.
Like other best-sellers that circulated secretly in Enlightenment France, Delisle de Sales’s Philosophy of Nature was published abroad, and appeared in small pocket-size volumes that were convenient for clandestine reading. In his controversial book, Delisle de Sales included a short play about Newton in which he satirized contemporary discussions about faith and reason. For the dramatic opening scene, Newton (who in real life never even travelled as far as Oxford) is perched by the coast in Senegal, taking time off from checking his calculations of the tides to contemplate the grandeur of nature (Figure 5.1). The plot hinges on Newton being a vegetarian who intervenes in various dialogues between a merman, an oyster and a native African about whether or not they should eat each other. Newton, here set up as an icon of rationality, concludes that only the African is worth teaching, since his perception of God as a cockchafer does at least indicate that he can acquire a human soul.2
For modern readers, the humour of a play that could be broadly summarized by the Cartesian quip ‘I eat, therefore I think’ appears somewhat strained. However, Delisle de Sales was not the only author who imaginatively incorporated Newton within settings that strike us as bizarre, but which made serious comments on profound philosophical issues. For instance, in 1748, Denis Diderot, one of the two major editors of the Encyclopédie, published an erotic novel, The Indiscreet Jewels (perhaps he regretted this venture the following year when he was arrested for producing seditious literature). French aristocrats snapped up copies of what turned out to be Diderot’s most popular work, which metaphorically vaunted female sexuality as well as Enlightenment rationality. Eager purchasers evidently relished the pornographic wit articulated by the ‘jewels’ (sexual organs) of gossiping women, but they also appreciated Diderot’s subversive, thinly veiled references to prominent figures in the French establishment, including the King. In one chapter, Newton features in a sultan’s dream about the phallic rise (and collapse) of science. Another scene is set at the Academy of Banzo, where Circino, the Newtonian philosopher of attraction, engages his Cartesian rival in a debating duel, significantly conducted under the light of the full moon.3
Finding Newton in under-the-counter literature comes as rather a shock, but by the middle of the eighteenth century he had become a cultural figurehead well outside academic circles. Delisle de Sales’s spell in prison indicates how dangerous materialist philosophies were perceived to be. On the other hand, that Diderot should use Newton to spice up soft pornography illustrates to what extent philosophical controversy was a popular topic of conversation. Newton’s rise to iconic status depended not only on the direct propagation of his ideas in elite intellectual texts, but also on his frequent appearances in a huge range of poems and pictures, books and buildings. Using extravagant language, French poets celebrated Newton as a ‘tow’ring genius . . . Sagacious! comprehensive! and sublime!’. More pithily, a facetious society gossip reported that ‘One may see Lawyers forsake the Bar to busy themselves in the study of Attraction, and Divines neglect their Theological exercises for its sake.’4
By the end of the century, this English hero had become the French God of Reason. This was far from being a straightforward process. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, Frenchmen argued about the validity of some aspects of Newton’s theories right through the eighteenth century. For one thing, chauvinistic interests dominated the acceptance of philosophical systems. In a letter to a French colleague, an English mathematician regretted the universal ‘Tyranny of Prejudice’ affecting ‘even the most zealous and industrious Searchers after Truth . . . We have our Newton, the Germans their Leibniz, and you your Descartes.’5
Long after Newton’s optical ideas had been broadly accepted, eminent natural philosophers rejected his concept of gravitational attraction, and many of them never agreed with various aspects of his work. But different theories were gradually cut and pasted together to create new syntheses in a Lego-like approach to constructing models of the universe. By the end of the century, French people who thought of themselves as Newtonian were in reality imbibing and disseminating an international blend of Newtonian, Cartesian and Leibnizian approaches to nature.
Reactions to Newton’s ideas were strongly affected by religious debates. Most controversially, the Baron d’Holbach relied on Newtonian principles in his System of Nature of 1770. Perceived as hugely threatening, this notorious yet influential manifesto of Enlightenment materialism was not translated into English for almost a century. D’Holbach horrified many readers (including those who had not opened the book) by denying the existence of the human soul. He argued that people are made solely from matter, so their behaviour must be entirely governed by mechanical laws. Claiming that the basic urge driving human behaviour is self-preservation, d’Holbach reformulated Newton’s first law of motion: ‘Newton calls it force of inertia, moralists have called it in man self-love . . . This gravitation is thus a necessary disposition in man and in all beings, who . . . tend to persevere in the existence they have received, as long as nothing disturbs the order of their machine or its primitive tendency.’6
Often pointing to d’Holbach’s book, devout Catholics bracketed Newton, Descartes and Leibniz together, fearing that any natural philosophy posed a threat to religious belief. Even towards the end of the century, several contradictory positions thrived at the same time, because Newton could be reinterpreted to suit different theological interpretations. Most Jesuits denounced Newton as an atheist and a materialist who had constructed a Godless universe. But other experts enlisted Newton on the opposite side, insisting that his orderly cosmos proved the existence of a divine architect. This was, for instance, the position that the elderly Voltaire came to defend.7
But despite these scientific and religious debates, Newton was converted into an iconic figurehead. As part of their rationalizing propaganda, Enlightenment philosophers held him up as a shining exemplar of the invaluable contributions that scientific knowledge could make to social progress. The Encyclopédie’s introduction, often taken as the defining manifesto of Enlightenment thought, gave pride of place to Newton, celebrating him as the century’s leading genius who, supplanting Descartes, had ‘appeared at last, and gave philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep’.8 Because gravity could be praised as a democratic force that affected everyone equally, Newton became a hero for Revolutionary citoyens (citizens). But at the same time, he remained ‘le chevalier anglais (the English knight)’, leader of a new intellectual aristocracy.
Renowned for his mathematical approach to nature and his work on optics, Newton personified the two major preoccupations of French Enlightenment philosophers – reason and vision. The very term Enlightenment conjured up the strong bonds between seeing and knowing, between lucidity and rationality, an ocular paradigm that ruled particularly strongly in France. French writers, architects and artists played with multiply punning imagery of mental and optical illumination, of cosmological and terrestrial order. Rays from the Sun King had shone over but also controlled his subjects, while the Masonic all-seeing eye so prevalent in Revolutionary iconography indicated God’s omniscience. Similarly, Newton had wielded a prism to analyse the light of God, and had focused his mind to deduce how gravity bound His universe together.9
Pursuing this optical metaphor, the Encyclopédie placed ‘the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast labyrinth [of human knowledge], where he can perceive the principal sciences and arts simultaneously’. Poets expressed the same image more lyrically. As they hymned Newton’s celestial vision and power, they often gave him the piercing gaze of a high-flying eagle, traditional symbol of a genius’s sight, or transformed him into a spirit roaming the heavens. French poetry of this period does not enjoy a good reputation. Modern readers do not relish long poems whose dedications start:
O SHINING SPIRIT! . . .
To thee, whose eye sounded the depths of the universe,
Great shade of Newton, I address my verses!
Nevertheless, such tributes played a vital role in consolidating Newton’s fame and confirming the semi-divine status that he was acquiring.10
Well before the end of the century, it had become perfectly consistent to praise Newton as a genius and yet disagree profoundly with aspects of his philosophy. How could an English natural philosopher, whose theories were never fully accepted, be lauded as a semi-divine genius under a French egalitarian regime? One way of resolving such apparent paradoxes is to consider that Newton became fêted not so much as an individual in his own right, but rather as a transcendent entity, an abstract idealization, so that pictures, poems and buildings represented not Newton himself, but the concepts of reason, order and genius that he came to personify.
Voltaire’s presence looms so strongly that he is often credited with having brought Newton to the French people almost single-handedly, but Newton’s renown travelled along numerous other routes. His elevation to international glory was unique. Our understanding of why and how this happened is greatly enriched by looking at some of the commemorative statues, poems and buildings that reached people who held no deep knowledge of gravity or optics, but whose sentiments affected the conduct of science.
Displacing Descartes
One of the more contrived jokes circulating among French wits concerned a Newtonian and a Cartesian who had a fight. Because the Newtonian lacked any repulsive force, he fell to the ground when the Cartesian’s fist was attracted to his centre instead of being deflected in a circle.11 But even sophisticated commentators reduced the complex French debates about natural philosophy into a power struggle between two adversaries.
Like Newton, Descartes was a national figurehead who carried great symbolic importance even for those who had only a scanty knowledge of his theories. For years both heroes coexisted – sometimes joined by Leibniz and Euler – as icons of modern progress. But as science and philosophy gradually became separate academic disciplines, Newton became heralded as a scientific founding father who had superseded his French predecessor. Descartes, on the other hand, was placed in the philosophical canon, so that although his research in mathematics and experimental physics came to seem less significant, he retained his heroic status.
Shortly after Newton’s funeral, Voltaire provided an instantly quotable contrast:
A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else. He has left the world full, he finds it empty. In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind . . . For your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation . . .
Writing in political exile, Voltaire was keen to make France seem reactionary in comparison with libertarian England, and he emphasized that Newton was the greatest man who had ever lived because he governed by truth rather than violence.12
In his funeral eulogy to Newton, the distinguished French philosopher Bernard de la Fontenelle offended sensibilities on both sides of the Channel by bracketing him with Descartes. Both of them, he told the horrified Paris Academy of Sciences, were geniuses. Immediately published in French and English, Fontenelle’s tribute to an English hero caused a minor European sensation: Charles-Louis Montesquieu even demanded that copies be couriered out as gifts for his hosts in Vienna. Conduitt, who had provided Fontenelle with many biographical details, later complained that he had not done ‘justice to that great man who had eclipsed the glory of their hero Descartes’, but victory was neither as swift nor as total as Conduitt claimed to believe.13 Even Fontenelle warned his audience not to succumb to the temptation of believing in attraction, and although at mid-century the Encyclopédie insisted that Cartesianism had been banished from France, this bold assertion was itself an exaggerated advertisement for Newtonian ideas.
Far from being a palace coup, Newton’s succession was slow, patchy and complicated. In the 1670s, his early work on optics had initially met with a cool reception. Intrigued yet sceptical researchers found they could not replicate his results, so that Newton gained the reputation in French academic circles of being a brilliant mathematician but a ham-fisted experimenter. Convincing confirmation only came some forty years later, when Desaguliers redesigned many of Newton’s original experiments. Fortunately for Newton’s international renown, natural philosophers converged on London in 1715, ostensibly to celebrate the Hanoverian King’s accession to the throne, but more probably to witness a total solar eclipse. Fanning foreign enthusiasm with diplomatic gifts and dinner invitations, Newton and his allies ensured that the visitors carried experimental instructions back home, and also encouraged the publication of a handsome Parisian edition of the Opticks.
Meanwhile, the Principia had not gained many European adherents. Among the few readers competent to judge it, most agreed that while Newton had produced an inspired mathematical hypothesis, it bore little relationship to physical reality. But during the 1730s, dogmatic resistance started to soften. It was a Jesuit priest, a self-taught disciple of Descartes called Nicolas Malebranche, who first convinced loyal Cartesians to incorporate some elements of Newton’s ideas into their own world view. Although Malebranche and his admirers never did relinquish their swirling vortices of particles, they were won over to Newton’s laws of gravitation. This partial acceptance paved the way for the more militant Newtonian revisionists who succeeded them.14
But outside narrow academic circles, an ambitious young mathematician called Pierre Maupertuis played a far more dramatic role in persuading the French nation to embrace English cosmology. Already the author of an explicitly Newtonian book on astronomy, Maupertuis was an inspired self-publicist whose rise to fame had as much to do with his skill at convincing different factions of his expertise as with his experimental results. Maupertuis benefited from the revival of an old debate, one which provided the grounds for Voltaire to quip that ‘In Paris you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides.’15 Cartesians envisaged the earth as being slightly compressed round its middle, while according to Newton, it should be flattened at the poles.
The French Academy of Sciences decided to resolve the issue by sending teams to Peru and Lapland during the 1730s. On paper, comparing measurements taken as near as possible to the Equator and the North Pole sounds like a simple way of distinguishing conclusively between these competing theoretical positions, but the real-life situation was, inevitably, far more complex. The adventurous explorers were relatively inexperienced, cosseted young gentlemen who suddenly had to contend with extremes of temperature and terrain, while in Paris, experts argued from the comfort of their drawing rooms about the best type of instrument to use, and the validity of the measurements. Far from being neutral arbitrators, members of both camps had made up their minds in advance what the answer would be: personal reputations and national pride were at stake in this supposedly scientific contest.
