6 - Rebellion

Summary

NEWTON'S REPEATED PROTESTATION thathe was engaged in other 1 \ l studies supplied an ever-present theme to his correspondence of the 1670s. Already in July 1672, only six months after the Royal Society discovered him to be a man supremely skilled in optics, he wrote to Oldenburg that he doubted he would make further trials with telescopes, “being desirous to prosecute some other subjects.” Three-and-a-half years later, he put off the composition of a general treatise on colors because of unspecified obligations and some “buisines of my own w^ch at present almost take up my time & thoughts.” Apparently the other business was not mathematics, because later in 1676 he hoped the second letter for Leibniz would be the last. “For having other things in my head, it proves an unwelcome interruption to me to be at this time put upon considering these things.” He was not only preoccupied, he was almost frantic in his impatience. “S^r,” he concluded the letter, “I am in great hast, Yours.…” In great haste because of what? Surely not because of ten lectures on algebra that he purportedly delivered in 1676. And not because of pupils or collegial duties, for he had none of either. Only the pursuit of Truth could so drive Newton to distraction that he resented the interruption a letter offered. Newton was in a state of ecstasy again. If mathematics and optics had lost the capacity to dominate him, it was because other studies had supplanted them.

One of the studies was chemistry. Collins mentioned his absorption in it twice in letters to Gregory. Years later, when he chatted with Conduitt about his early life in Cambridge, Newton himself mentioned that Wickins helped in his “chymical experiments.” His interest in it developed somewhat later than his interest in natural philosophy. When he composed the “Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae” in the mid-i66os, he entered almost nothing that one would call chemistry, even though Robert Boyle was one of the major sources of his new mechanical philosophy. When he extended his notes on a number of the headings under “Quaestiones” in a new notebook, however, chemistry did begin to appear, and the notes indicate that Boyle supplied his introduction to the subject. Newton's ability to organize what he learned so that he could retrieve it was a significant aspect of his genius.