Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle delivered this memorial address on Sir Isaac Newton as Perpetual Secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris; it was printed in London in 1728, the year after Newton’s death, and offers a French academician’s reckoning with the English genius who had just died. Part biography, part scientific commentary, part meditation on how great minds differ, the address moves from Newton’s birth and education through his mathematical discoveries, his natural philosophy, his public career, and his final years. Fontenelle writes as a European intellectual addressing other learned Europeans, and his admiration for Newton never prevents him from measuring the man against Descartes, the presiding figure of French philosophy.
“Nature conceals thy infant Stream with care, Nor lets thee, but in Majeſty appear.”
From Woolstrope to the Infinite Series
Fontenelle begins at the beginning. Newton was born at Woolstrope in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day, 1642, descended from the elder branch of the family of Sir To Newton Baronet, with the manor in his family for nearly two hundred years. His mother, Hannah Ascough, came from an ancient family and remarried after his father’s death. When the boy was twelve she sent him to the Free-school at Grantham, then withdrew him so he might learn to manage his affairs—but finding him so careless of business and so absorbed in books, she sent him back, and he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, admitted in 1660 at eighteen.
The portrait of the young Newton is of a mind that refused ordinary roads. Learning mathematics, he did not study Euclid, who seemed to him too plain and simple to be worth his time; he understood him almost before reading him, and a glance at the theorems was enough to master them. He advanced at once to Descartes’s geometry and Kepler’s optics. Fontenelle applies to him Lucan’s lines on the Nile, whose source nature concealed from all—the young Newton, like that river, appearing only in majesty.
What follows is the heart of Fontenelle’s early account: the claim that Newton had made his great discoveries in geometry and laid the foundation of both the Principia and the Opticks by the age of twenty-four. The occasion for telling this is Nicholas Mercator’s Logarithmotechnia of 1668, which gave the quadrature of the hyperbola by an infinite series—the first appearance in the learned world of such a series drawn from the particular nature of a curve. Dr. Barrow at Cambridge remembered meeting the same thing in the writings of the young Newton, and not confined to the hyperbola but extended by general forms to all sorts of curves, even mechanical ones, to their quadratures, rectifications, centers of gravity, the solids formed by their rotation, and the surfaces of those solids. Where determinations were possible the series stopped at a certain point or their sums were given by stated rules; where impossible, they could still be infinitely approximated—which Fontenelle calls the happiest and most refined method of supplying the defects of human knowledge that the imagination could invent.
Newton’s response to Mercator’s publication reveals the modesty Fontenelle returns to repeatedly. Seeing that he was in the way to such a discovery and that others might follow, he should naturally have opened his treasures and secured the glory of being first. Instead he contented himself with the treasure itself. In a letter in the Commercium epistolicum he says he thought Mercator had entirely discovered the secret, or that others would discover it before he was of an age to write. His manuscript on infinite series was communicated to none but Mr. Collins and Lord Brounker, and even that only because Barrow would not suffer him to indulge his modesty so much as he desired. The manuscript, taken from his study in 1669 under the title “The method which I formerly found out,” implies—if “formerly” means no more than three years—that he had discovered this theory before he was twenty-four.
The System of the World and the Return of Attraction
Fontenelle then turns to the Principia itself, and his exposition has a clear structure: first the marvel that so abstract a theory yields conclusions not only necessary but conformable to the approved axioms of astronomy, sometimes foretelling events astronomers had not remarked. The case in point is Jupiter and Saturn, which, when nearest—at 165 million leagues—lose the regularity they show in the rest of their course. The Newtonian system accounts for this at once, where no other can: the planets being nearer attract each other with greater force, and the system goes further, determining the quantity and bounds of the irregularity.
The Moon comes next, the least regular of the planets, whose excursions the most exact tables sometimes get wrong. Fontenelle quotes Dr. Halley—whose profound skill in mathematics did not prevent his being a good poet—writing in the Latin verses prefixed to the Principia that we learn at last why the silver Moon does not advance with equal steps and refuses the bridle of calculations no astronomer before had mastered. All her irregularities are shown to proceed from a necessity by which they are foretold, and Fontenelle argues it is difficult to imagine such a system is merely a lucky conjecture, since it is but a small part of a theory that comprehends an infinite number of other solutions with the same success. The tides, too, so naturally appear to proceed from the Moon’s operation on the sea combined with the Sun’s that the admiration the phenomenon used to raise seems lessened.
The second great theory on which the Principia chiefly runs is the resistance of mediums to motion, which must enter into all the chief phenomena of nature—the motions of celestial bodies, of light and sound. Newton lays foundations in the most solid proofs of geometry, considers all causes from which resistance can arise (the density of the medium, the swift motion of the body, the magnitude of its surface), and draws conclusions that destroy all the vortices of Descartes and overturn that immense celestial edifice thought immoveable. If the planets move in any medium—an ethereal matter filling the whole, which despite being extremely subtle will yet cause resistance—whence comes it that their motions are not perpetually, nay instantly, lessened? How can comets traverse those vortices freely every way, sometimes with a tendency absolutely opposite, without sensible alteration in their motions? Whence comes it that these immense torrents, whirling with almost incredible velocity, do not instantly destroy the particular motion of any body, an atom in comparison of them? The celestial bodies therefore move in a vast vacuum, unless their exhalations and the rays of light mingle a small quantity of matter with the almost infinite immaterial spaces. Thus attraction and vacuum, banished from physics by Descartes and in all appearance for ever, are brought back by Newton, armed with an entirely new power and only perhaps a little disguised.
Two Systems, Two Tempers
The comparison of Newton and Descartes is the intellectual center of the Elogium. Fontenelle finds the two men alike in several respects: both geniuses of the first rank, both born with superior understandings, fitted for founding empires in knowledge; both excellent geometers who saw the necessity of introducing geometry into physics and founded their physics on discoveries in geometry—almost, he says, of none but themselves. But their tempers diverged. One, taking a bold flight, thought at once to reach the fountain of all things and by clear and fundamental ideas make himself master of the first principles, so that nothing remained but to descend to the phenomena of nature as necessary consequences. The other, more cautious or rather more modest, began by taking hold of the known phenomena to climb to unknown principles, resolved to admit them only as produced by a chain of consequences. The former sets out from what he clearly understands to find the causes of what he sees; the latter sets out from what he sees to find out the cause, whether clear or obscure. The self-evident principles of the one do not always lead him to the causes of the phenomena as they are; the phenomena do not always lead the other to principles sufficiently evident. The boundaries that stopped two such men through different roads, Fontenelle concludes, were not the boundaries of their understanding but of human understanding itself.
While composing the Principia, Newton had another work in birth, as original and as new, which by its title did not seem so general yet was as extensive by the manner in which he treated its particular subject: the Opticks, or treatise of light and colours, which first appeared in 1704, after thirty years of experiments. Fontenelle pauses on the art of making experiments exactly—every matter of fact is so complicated with others that compound or modify it that without abundance of skill they cannot be separated, and without extraordinary sagacity the different elements entering into the composition can hardly be guessed at. The fact must be resolved into the different ones composing it, and they themselves are perhaps composed of others; without the right road one may be engaged in endless labyrinths. The principles and elements of things, he observes, seem concealed from us by nature with as much care as the—and here the notes break off, at the threshold of the Opticks proper.
The Professor, the Warden, and the Knight
The address turns to Newton’s public life. The privileges of the University of Cambridge—where he had been Mathematical Professor since 1669, following Dr. Barrow’s resignation in his favor—were attacked by King James II in 1687, the year the Principia appeared. Newton was very zealous in asserting those privileges, and the University named him one of the Delegates to the High Commission court. He was likewise one of the University’s representatives in the Convention-Parliament of 1688 and sat in it until it was dissolved.
In 1696 the Earl of Hallifax, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a great patron of learned men—the English nobility, Fontenelle notes, do not think it honorable to slight them but are frequently such themselves—obtained from King William the office of Warden of the Mint for Newton, in which employment he was very serviceable in the great re-coinage of that time. Three years later he was made Master and Worker, a place of considerable profit, which he enjoyed until his death. Fontenelle observes that the place may be thought to have suited him because he was an excellent geometer with great skill in physics, the business often requiring difficult calculations and many chemical experiments—proofs of his skill appearing in his Table of the Essays of foreign Coins printed at the end of Dr. Arbuthnot’s book. But his genius extended to merely political matters with no mixture of speculative sciences: upon the calling of Parliament in 1701 he was again chosen a representative for the University of Cambridge. It may be an error, Fontenelle suggests, to regard the sciences and business as incompatible, especially for men of a certain turn, since political affairs, when well understood, are naturally reduced to refined calculations and have so near an affinity that those used to sublime speculations comprehend them with greater facility and certainty once acquainted with the facts and furnished with proper materials.
It was Newton’s peculiar happiness to enjoy the reward of his merit in his lifetime, quite contrary to Descartes, who received no honors until after his death. The English do not respect great geniuses the less for being born among them; rather than depreciate them by malicious criticisms or approve envy, they conspire to raise them, and their great liberty, which occasions differences on the most important points, does not hinder them from uniting in this. All the learned men of the nation placed Newton at their head by a kind of unanimous applause, acknowledging him as their chief and master; not one opposer dared appear—they would not even have admitted a moderate admirer. His philosophy was adopted throughout England and prevailed in the Royal Society and in all excellent performances from thence, as if made sacred by a long series of ages. He was reverenced so greatly that death could procure him no new honors—he saw his own apotheosis. Tacitus, who reproached the Romans with their indifference for great men, would have given the English the contrary character; he would have told the Romans that great merit never was common, or that we should endeavor to make it so by the honor we annex to it.
In 1703 Newton was chosen President of the Royal Society and continued so without interruption until his death, a space of twenty-three years—a singular example from which no ill consequences could be feared hereafter. Queen Anne knighted him in 1705, a title serving at least to show his name had reached the Throne, to which the most celebrated names do not always arrive.
The Princess and the Chronology
He was more known than ever at the court of the late King. The Princess of Wales had so excellent an understanding and so much knowledge that she was capable of asking questions of so great a man and could receive satisfactory answers from none but himself; she often declared publicly that she thought it a happiness to live in his time and be acquainted with him. Newton had composed a treatise of Ancient Chronology which he had no thoughts of publishing, but the Princess, to whom he imparted some chief points, thought them so new and full of art that she desired a summary of the whole work, which she would never part with and would be alone in possessing; she still keeps it among her choicest rarities. A copy escaped, however, and curiosity excited by such a piece meant Newton could hardly be hindered from employing the utmost address to come at so great a treasure—and they must have been very severe who would have condemned such curiosity. The copy was brought into France by the person so happy as to procure it, and the value he had for it hindered his being very careful of it, so that it was seen, translated, and at length printed.
The main design of this System of Chronology, as appears by the extract, is to find out, by following with abundance of sagacity some faint tracks of the most ancient Greek astronomy, the position of the colure of the equinoxes with respect to the fixed stars in the time of Chiron the Centaur. Since it is now known these stars have a motion in longitude of one degree in seventy-two years, if it is once known that in Chiron’s time the colure passed through certain fixed stars, then by taking their distance from those through which it now passes, it may be known how much time has elapsed from Chiron until our days. Chiron was one of those who went with the Argonauts in their famous expedition; this would fix the epoch of that expedition and consequently that of the Trojan War—two great events on which all ancient chronology depends.
The Measure of a Mind
What Fontenelle has built across these pages is less a catalogue of discoveries than a study in intellectual character. The infinite series, the Principia, the Opticks, the chronology—each serves as evidence for a single thesis: that Newton’s greatness lay in a modesty so complete it became a method. He would not publish what he had found; he would not contest priority; he waited, as Fontenelle puts it, until he was of a fit age to write, though he was already capable of the greatest things. Against the bold, deductive Descartes, who began from clear ideas and descended to phenomena, Fontenelle sets the cautious, inductive Newton, who began from phenomena and climbed to principles. The comparison is not a verdict against either man. It is an argument that the limits each met were the limits of human understanding, not of their own.
The Elogium also records something rarer than scientific achievement: a nation’s unanimous esteem. Fontenelle, writing from Paris, dwells on the English capacity to honor their great men while alive—the Royal Society’s adoption of Newtonian philosophy, the knighthood, the Princess’s eagerness, the absence of any opposer. His Tacitus aside carries the weight of the whole address: great merit is never common, and the honor a society attaches to it is how a society makes it less rare. Newton, in Fontenelle’s telling, saw his own apotheosis—and the elogium is the French Academy’s tribute that death could add nothing to it.
