Newton, page 21
One way of illustrating this loose slippage of genius from one context to another is to examine the essays and newspaper articles written by the most influential commentator on genius, William Hazlitt. Hazlitt often drew a sharp cleavage between scientific subjects that demand methodical application, and the fine arts of painting and poetry, which – he claimed – depend on genius. Achieving scientific knowledge is, he explained in 1814, a cumulative process independent of any one individual’s mental powers. In contrast, artistic geniuses tower above their peers and endure for ever. Yet despite this concern to separate the arts and the sciences, over the following years Hazlitt’s ambiguous phrasing sometimes left it unclear whether he intended to describe Newton as a genius or not. In a famous essay about genius and greatness, he declared that ‘lawgivers, philosophers, founders of religion, conquerors and heroes, inventors and great geniuses in arts and sciences, are great men . . . Among ourselves, Shakespeare, Newton, Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, were great men; for they shewed great power by acts and thoughts, which have not yet been consigned to oblivion.’ Is Hazlitt describing Newton simply as a great man, or also as a genius of science?48
By 1830, Hazlitt judged that genius implies ‘the greatest strength and sagacity to discover and dig the ore from the mine of truth’. This clichéd definition seems entirely appropriate for Newton, yet actually he was discussing artists such as Reynolds and Titian. In an essay concluding with a dramatic account of Galileo, Hazlitt wrote that truth is the essence of originality, which is itself the criterion of genius: ‘the value of any work of art or science depends chiefly on the quantity of originality contained in it’. This older Hazlitt had evidently become far more willing to juxtapose science and original genius. Perhaps he was thinking of Newton when he wrote: ‘The mind resembles a prism, which untwists the various rays of truth, and displays them by different modes and in several parcels.’49
Rational progress
The developments of English and French genius were very different, yet in both countries, accolades of Newton fashioned changes in the very concept of genius itself. When the editors of the Encyclopédie were drawing near the end of the alphabet, they must have realized that they had forgotten to include an entry specifically discussing Newton himself. Fortunately for them, he had been born in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe, and it was under the heading ‘Wolstrope’ that a French biographer proclaimed: ‘England can be proud of itself for having produced the greatest & the rarest genius that ever existed.’50 This claim is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. It was designed to persuade readers as well as to inform them, since even in the 1770s some doubtful readers still needed to be convinced that Newton’s glory should eclipse that of Descartes.
In France, discussions of Newton’s genius were intimately bound up with ideological claims that reason was the motor of progress. As autocratic rulers and churchmen became less powerful, they were supplanted by a new intellectual monarchy led by secular heroes. Newton was elevated to the semi-divine status of a great historical figure, a timeless genius who served symbolic functions.
One of Napoleonic France’s most prominent playwrights, Népomucène Lemercier, wrote a poetic epic devoted to humanity’s four great men – Homer, Alexander, Moses and Newton. Newton, the rational man of science, now belonged to a collective pantheon of geniuses unlimited by epoch or field of achievement. Like a religious offering, Lemercier dedicated his scientific section to Newton: ‘My fable is a homage to your genius’. Titled Newtonian Theogony, its rhyming couplets described a fictional Atlantis inhabited by a large cast of mythological characters whose romantic exploits allegorically explained modern concepts. By 1834, at the peak of French Romanticism, Newton and genius had become so automatically linked together that Victor Hugo selected a Newtonian metaphor to evoke a genius’s special power: ‘through an irresistible law of attraction, all minds gravitated around the radiating mind’.51
The French Revolution is often held to be the birth of the modern world, and Newton’s political role as the French genius of reason is an important component in this story of his reputations. Just as in England, the word genius carried various implications in France. Its meaning was so contested that the Encyclopédie had five separate entries, as well as various definitions scattered within other articles. Quite evidently, contributors held contrasting and often conflicting views of this elusive concept. Many of them were swayed by Diderot, who was probably also the behind-the-scenes author of one of the genius essays. Placing a new emphasis on imagination, Diderot challenged the conventional French view that genius was rooted in rationality. Instead of celebrating geniuses as the favoured beneficiaries of divine inspiration, he suggested they should be revered – and feared – for being driven by their own internal passions. Because Diderot constantly revised his concepts of genius and originality, his arguments were far from consistent, yet he was grappling with precisely the dilemma that lay at the heart of debates about that paradoxical term, scientific genius. How, he wondered, could he reconcile his belief in the power of rational, deductive reasoning with his more intuitive sense that creative thought must depend on making illogical leaps?52
In his novella Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot pushed this interpretation to extremes by depicting a mad genius who dangerously threatened the boundary between enlightened, thoughtful people and the criminally insane. His work strongly influenced Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a prolific writer who is now scarcely remembered, but whose sentimental novels broke sales records in the last third of the century and came to inspire more famous authors such as Hugo. Mercier articulated the central paradox of converting the hyper-rational Newton into a Romantic genius: how can methodical, deductive reasoning be compatible with the intuitive, almost random, juxtaposition of previously unconnected ideas? Mercier presented a Jekyll and Hyde version of Newton. During sleep, his brain is plagued by erroneous ideas and vague phantoms that, like scattered soldiers responding to a drum roll, leap into order the instant he awakes to become, once more, ‘the man of genius, who pursued truth with such admirable wisdom’.53
But most of Mercier’s contemporaries avoided confronting this dilemma. Romantic concepts were taken up far later in France than in either Germany or England, partly because of political differences. It was not until the 1820s that Romanticism, with its emphasis on original creativity, became important, when it was as much a political as a literary rebellion. The young authors who insisted passionately on intellectual freedom of expression were also seeking to overthrow the reactionary power of conservative social institutions. Before then, despite Diderot, writers continued to emphasize that genius was a rational faculty bestowed by God, and possessed by everyone to a greater or lesser extent.
The English and German cults of genius were stimulated by fights to gain copyright ownership for original works, but this impetus was lacking in France, where the state supervised patents and copyrights far more closely. Provided writers and inventors could satisfy the stringent bureaucratic requirements, they benefited from financial assistance and protection. On the other hand, they were also subject to tighter controls. Before the Revolution, the central administration had exerted a tight print censorship by giving the King sole power to grant authors the privilege of publishing their works. Writers could not own or sell ideas, ministers argued, because these were a gift from God: only the King, His representative on earth, could determine what knowledge God had chosen to reveal. Such attitudes obviously dampened enthusiasm for original genius. In 1789, freedom of the press became heralded as an inviolable right, but although the old system was abolished, individual authors still had fewer rights than in England. Truth was now to be found in nature, which was the property of everyone, so that the role of writers was to act as agents of enlightenment by ensuring open access to knowledge. Under this democratic reformulation, originality again became devalued as authors lost their former privileged status to become public servants.54
Unlike Young and the other British moral philosophers who stressed originality and creativity, influential French authors maintained that inventive genius was based on skill, ingenuity and – above all – reason. Whether excelling in literary, artistic or scientific spheres, a man of genius was not intrinsically different from his peers, but was able to reason more quickly. By mid-century, Newton had joined an international roll-call of great Enlightenment men inspired by the genius of reason. In one of Mercier’s poems, Fenélon and Addison provided convenient rhymes for Newton, as ‘Genius spread its divine greatness’ over ‘a hundred different names nurturing Reason’. This bond was, if anything, tightened during the Revolution, when reason became a virtue to be hymned along with liberty and equality. As the Jacobin Marie-Josèphe Chénier put it, ‘It’s good sense, reason, that does everything . . . And genius is sublime reason.’55
Discussing Newton’s genius became important in political and philosophical debates about equality and the relationships between the state, the individual and science. While English monarchs had lent little but their name to the Royal Society, the French crown had always provided financial support for the Paris Academy. This alliance between science and government increased during the Revolutionary period, when politicians and philosophers fervently preached that scientific research promised social improvement. To strengthen their arguments, they made Newton an exemplary member of a new intellectual elite that was to supplant older hierarchies based on aristocratic and clerical power. At the same time, their polemical assertions about Newton’s special abilities made key contributions to French concepts of what it meant to be a genius.
Hailing Newton as a unique genius was riddled with ambiguities. How could an egalitarian society fête an exceptional individual? Was Newton born a genius, as some writers maintained, or did he become one? This question later entered Newtonian discussions in Victorian England, and is one aspect of what we call the nature–nurture problem. It became central to French debates about politics and education towards the end of the eighteenth century. If geniuses are born, not made, then progress lies in the hands of individuals rather than the natural evolution of society.
Newton became enmeshed in French radical notions of social progress and perfectibility at two levels. Most obviously, he was the outstanding example of a rational genius in the modern era, the man who had stood on the shoulders of Descartes and other giants to bring order to the cosmos. More fundamentally, many philosophers and men of science believed that Newtonian-type laws could be used to describe the development of living beings and even society itself. Newton himself symbolized the possibilities of progress; at the same time, strengthening his significance, his success at mathematizing the physical universe seemed to guarantee that laws governing social improvement could also be found. Newton the astronomical law-maker provided an icon for human legislators. When the legal reformer Jeremy Bentham had studied French radical philosophers as a young man, he confidently boasted that ‘The moral world has . . . had its Bacon; but its Newton is yet to come.’56
In his controversial funeral eulogy, Fontenelle had proclaimed that Descartes and Newton ‘were geniuses of the first order, born to dominate other minds, and to build empires’. Just as a divinely appointed king was born to rule a nation, so too, God gave a few selected men the gift of genius so that they could conquer the realm of knowledge. Philosophical ideas about genius changed in tandem with political ones about hereditary privilege, as reformers stressed the importance of environment and education. Searching for laws governing social improvement, Condillac argued that climate affects a nation’s character and development. Progress, he insisted, depends on accumulating knowledge, so that future generations will inevitably be more advanced. Ironically, Newton was becoming a figurehead who underpinned exactly those progressive models of human development that themselves implied his own replacement in a succession of great geniuses.57
Condillac influenced France’s leading reformers, particularly the powerful politician Turgot, who was uniquely placed to implement as well as to generate new ideas about science and education. In his blueprint for change, individual geniuses featured as crucial agents of progress, so that intellectual leaders supplanted hereditary rulers. Rejecting older beliefs that some individuals were singled out at birth, Turgot taught that nature distributes ability equally: ‘Genius is spread amongst mankind like gold in a mine. The more ore you take out, the more metal you will get.’ Because of their social circumstances, he argued, too many people had been unable to develop their natural talents and had died in obscurity. By reforming the state education system, France’s gifted youth could be effectively nurtured so that as the population expanded, more geniuses like Newton would be produced. Displacing hereditary rulers, this new intellectual aristocracy would ensure France’s rapid scientific and technological progress.58
The major manifesto of perfectibility, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, was written by Turgot’s aristocratic disciple, the Marquis de Condorcet, as he hid in a friend’s house to escape the Terror. Published in 1795 shortly after his death in prison, 3,000 copies were immediately distributed as official government doctrine. Condorcet outlined a nine-stage model of human history, in which ‘we pass by imperceptible gradations from the brute to the savage and from the savage to Euler and Newton’; at last, Newton appeared to provide ‘a law that has hitherto remained unique, like the glory of the man who revealed it’. Concerned with how new inventions affected society, Condorcet looked forward to his tenth and future epoch, which promised unlimited advances in knowledge and virtue. For him, Newton’s major contribution to ‘the progress of the human mind’ lay in his demonstration that precise mathematical methods held the key to discovery.59
Condorcet tried to negotiate the apparent contradiction between egalitarian ideologies and the singularity of great geniuses. Mirroring Condillac, he stressed that scientific advance was not inevitable, but depended on a great thinker being in the right place at the right time. ‘Had [Newton] appeared earlier,’ Condillac had maintained, ‘he might have been a great man for the age he lived in, but he would not have been the admiration of ours.’ Newton’s success, Turgot declared, ‘will be useful to us in showing how the happy conjunctions of chance combined with the efforts of genius to lead to a great discovery, and how less favourable conjunctions might have retarded them or reserved them for other hands’. Even an ordinary schoolboy, he rather unrealistically claimed, now knew more mathematics than Newton. Under Condorcet’s influence, educational reformers pinned their hopes on fostering incipient geniuses – potential French Newtons – who would, through promoting France’s intellectual and technological supremacy, bring equal benefits to all the nation’s citizens.60
But around the turn of the century, some disillusioned idealists sceptically dismissed Condorcet and the other philosophical reformers of their parents’ generation as naive optimists. For this heterogeneous group of social utopians, Newton provided an emblematic father figure who symbolized exactly that Enlightenment emphasis on rationality against which they were reacting. Emphasizing their own poverty and rejection, these mystically inclined young men depicted citizens not as identical atoms democratically governed by the same laws, but as diverse individuals who were spiritually motivated to live together in mutually beneficial communities. Often rather vague and incoherent, their texts were not so much agents of change as symptomatic blueprints of contemporary social attitudes. Two of these visionary idealists – Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier – illustrate the powerful shadow cast by Newton’s iconic stature during the confused era between the Revolution and nineteenth-century positivism. Initially worshipping Newton as their intellectual ancestor, they later denounced their hero to present themselves as the new saviours of humanity.61
An aristocratic sans-culotte who abandoned his titles, Saint-Simon emerged from a short spell in prison to embark on an intensive self-education course in mathematics and physics as an unofficial student in Paris. Evidently with his own experiences of persecution painfully in mind, in 1803 he published his plans to reform society by establishing a secular faith based on Newton’s tomb in England, ‘that country which has constantly been a refuge for men of genius’. Following God’s instructions that he received in a dream, Saint-Simon proposed forming an international organization to provide financial support enabling geniuses (sub-text: himself) to dedicate themselves to their inventions. Unlike Newton, whom he condemned for selling out to become Master of the Mint, these geniuses would work for the benefit of all mankind. Written in Geneva, his hierarchical scheme was strategically – yet unsuccessfully – designed to gain Napoleon’s approval through flattery.62
In retrospect, Saint-Simon’s project seems an almost comical blend of rational egalitarianism and mystical idealism, but it reflects how this post-Revolution generation was preoccupied with finding new routes to social progress. Saint-Simon used Newton’s singular status to inspire an intellectual democracy headed by a small group of geniuses willing to transmute their self-interest into harmonious love. Each financial contributor would vote annually to choose twenty-one great geniuses, who would themselves elect a president. Divided into four international groups, the organization’s members would make a yearly pilgrimage to one of the local temples built in Newton’s honour. Saint-Simon’s imaginary buildings sound very similar to the cenotaphs to Newton designed by Boullée and his followers (Figure 5.3): perhaps he had encountered architectural students discussing them during the years he spent in Paris fraternizing with members of the École Polytechnique. Recalling the Masonic characteristics of these architects, in Saint-Simon’s temples dedicated to the Newtonian faith a special door provided entry for a privileged intellectual elite. Descending to an underground sanctum, they would participate in the rituals of Newtonian adoration.
