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In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit.—John Conduitt
How does one evaluate the accomplishments of a figure so large as Isaac Newton, particularly when those accomplishments themselves are beyond all but the most mathematically sophisticated of biographers? How does one chronicle the life of someone who walked so infrequently on ordinary roads and spent so much time on detours of his own devising? And, in the ultimate of biographical challenges, how does one begin to assess the impact of the latter on the former—the essential task of those who would profile the life and times of the truly great?
We can't escape limitations of time and place and intellect, but we can at least enlarge our vision by taking a stroll through the fields and forests of Newton's biographers, seeing him as others have seen him. Undertaken fully, this would require a very long book, but even a rough reconnaissance of the territory may be worthwhile.
Newton had a very beautiful niece who lived with him and ran his household for much of his life, particularly during the time that he was working at the Mint. Her name was Catherine Barton, and in 1717 she married John Conduitt, who succeeded Newton as Master of the Mint in 1727. Conduitt was not a man of science, but he did know a great deal about the latter part of Newton's personal life. Conduitt was thus the first and, for a rather long time, the most influential of Newton's many biographers.
Newton scholar Rupert Hall has produced a marvelous little volume titled Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1999), which gathers together a number of the most important early biographies of Newton. We must note that the word "biography" had a somewhat different meaning in the eighteenth century than it does now. Biographies were moral tales, omitting their subjects' quirks and foibles. And they were typically quite short, like the accounts in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets, closer to an article or a long essay than a book-length work. (Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson was exceptional on both counts.)
John Conduitt's preliminary "biography" of Newton was written for the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris and circulated in a variety of forms before finally appearing in print in 1806. Conduitt was no mathematician and did not presume to understand his subject's work in these areas. Conduitt did, however, actually make a request of those who had known Newton that they write down their recollections of the great man. This research was motivated, at least in part, by a eulogy of Newton produced by the French mathematician Bernard Fontenelle (1657-1757).
Employing language and categories that have since become standard, Fontenelle emphasized the distinction between rationalist and empiricist, deduction and induction, to distinguish Descartes from Newton. Remarkably, the comparison is balanced, with Descartes and Newton described as defining the limits of human mental capacity along these two different axes. Fontenelle is worth quoting in some detail on this, particularly for his clear presentation of the difference between deduction or rationalism, and induction or empiricism:
These two great men [Descartes and Newton], who are so strangely opposed to each other, had been closely alike. Both were geniuses of the first order, born to dominate other minds, and build empires. Both being excellent geometers, they saw the need to import geometry into physics. Both founded their physics on geometry which their intellects had framed. But one of them, flying high, sought to take his place at the head of everything, to master first principles by means of a few clear, fundamental ideas in order to descend thereafter to the level of natural phenomena as their necessary consequences. The other, less bold or more modest, set about his business by relying upon phenomena in order to rise to unknown principles, resolved to accept them to the extent that they followed from the order of things. The former starts from what he clearly understands to find the cause of what he perceives, the latter starts from what he perceives to discover its cause, whether clear or obscure. The former's evident principles do not always lead him to phenomena as they are, the phenomena do not always lead the other to evident principles. The boundaries halting the advance of two men of this caliber along two different lines of thought are not boundaries set by their intellects but by the human mind itself.
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