An essay concerning the late apparition in the heavens on the 6th of
March. Proving by mathematical, logical, and moral arguments, that it
cou'd not have been produced meerly by the ordinary course of nature,
but must of necessity be a prodigy. Humbly offered to the consideration
of the Royal Society. London, 1716, 8vo.
The prodigy, as described, was what we should call a very decided and
unusual aurora borealis. The inference was, that men's sins were bringing
on the end of the world. The author thinks that if one of the old
"threatening prophets" were then alive, he would give "something like the
following." I quote a few sentences of the notion which the author had of
the way in which Ezekiel, for instance, would have addressed his Maker in
the reign of George the First:
"Begin! Begin! O Sovereign, for once, with an {135} effectual clap of
thunder.... O Deity! either thunder to us no more, or when you thunder, do
it home, and strike with vengeance to the mark.... 'Tis not enough to raise
a storm, unless you follow it with a blow, and the thunder without the
bolt, signifies just nothing at all.... Are then your lightnings of so
short a sight, that they don't know how to hit, unless a mountain stands
like a barrier in their way? Or perhaps so many eyes open in the firmament
make you lose your aim when you shoot the arrow? Is it this? No! but, my
dear Lord, it is your custom never to take hold of your arms till you have
first bound round your majestic countenance with gathered mists and
clouds."
The principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive
Forces ... By Robert Greene,[279] M.A., Fellow of Clare Hall.
Cambridge, 1727, folio.
Sanderson[280] writes to Jones,[281] "The gentleman has been reputed mad
for these two years last past, but never gave the world such ample
testimony of it before." This was said of a former work of Greene's, on
solid geometry, published in 1712, in which he gives a quadrature.[282] He
gives the same or another, I do not know which, in the present work, in
which the circle is 3-1/5 diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio
pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at
all mad, only wrong on {136} many points. It is the weakness of the
orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary
dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about
Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene. If
misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, be sufficient evidence
of madness, it would be a curious inquiry what is the least per-centage of
the reigning school which has been insane at any one time. Greene is one of
the sources for Newton being led to think of gravitation by the fall of an
apple: his authority is the gossip of Martin Folkes.[283] Probably Folkes
had it from Newton's niece, Mrs. Conduitt, whom Voltaire acknowledges as
_his authority_.[284] It is in the draft found among Conduitt's papers of
memoranda to be sent to Fontenelle. But Fontenelle, though a great retailer
of anecdote, does not mention it in his _eloge_ of Newton; whence it may be
suspected that it was left out in the copy forwarded to France. D'Israeli
has got an improvement on the story: the apple "struck him a smart blow on
the head": no doubt taking him just on the organ of causality. He was
"surprised at the force of the stroke" from so small an apple: but then the
apple had a mission; Homer would have said {137} it was Minerva in the form
of an apple. "This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling
bodies," which Galileo had settled long before: "from whence he deduced the
principle of gravity," which many had considered before him, but no one had
_deduced anything from it_. I cannot imagine whence D'Israeli got the rap
on the head, I mean got it for Newton: this is very unlike his usual
accounts of things. The story is pleasant and possible: its only defect is
that various writings, well known to Newton, a very _learned_
mathematician, had given more suggestion than a whole sack of apples could
have done, if they had tumbled on that mighty head all at once. And
Pemberton, speaking from Newton himself, says nothing more than that the
idea of the moon being retained by the same force which causes the fall of
bodies struck him for the first time while meditating in a garden. One
particular tree at Woolsthorpe has been selected as the gallows of the
appleshaped goddess: it died in 1820, and Mr. Turnor[285] kept the wood;
but Sir D. Brewster[286] brought away a bit of root in 1814, and must have
had it on his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree.
Kepler's suggestion of gravitation with the inverse distance, and
Bouillaud's proposed substitution of the inverse square of the distance,
are things which Newton knew better than his modern readers. I discovered
two anagrams on his name, which are quite conclusive; the notion of
gravitation was _not new_; but Newton _went on_. Some wandering spirit,
probably whose business it was to resent any liberty taken with Newton's
name, put into the head of a friend of mine _eighty-one_ anagrams on my own
pair, some of which hit harder than any apple.
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