A Portrait of Isaac Newton

"Manuel’s book was published in 1968, so it’s considerably earlier than Westfall’s. Manuel was a brilliant historian and perhaps an even more brilliant writer. I personally think that, of all the books written on Newton, his is stylistically the most engaging. It’s just a terrific read. The book attempts to provide a kind of Freudian psychoanalytic study of Newton’s character. He tries to explain Newton’s psychology in terms of his childhood lack of a father. One thing that’s interesting about Manuel—and for that matter Westfall and almost everybody else who has come later—is that all these folks were influenced to some degree, perhaps without even realizing it, by John Maynard Keynes . There was a famous Sotheby’s auction of Newton manuscripts by his heirs in 1936 and Keynes managed to acquire about half of them. Most of them he subsequently gave to King’s College Cambridge, where they remain, but he wrote an extraordinary article called “ Newton the Man” which was published posthumously in 1947. In it, he argues famously that Newton was not the first scientist of the age of reason, but rather the last of the magicians. He tries to debunk the 18th-century view of Newton as a supreme rationalist and even possibly a deist. [Deists, in the 18th century, were people who believed in a supreme benevolent being who had set the universe in motion, but rejected the notion of an interventionist Christian God] Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the things that Keynes says in that essay is that Newton was “profoundly neurotic.” He portrays him as a solitary eccentric who was locked up in his study for 25 years or so in Cambridge, producing tremendously brilliant works and doing his alchemy in total isolation. That was Keynes’ view of Newton’s personality and character, and it was picked up by Manuel and dressed up in psychoanalytic clothing. It was subsequently adopted by Westfall as well and some other scholars, I would argue. So it’s impossible to discuss people like Manuel and Westfall without understanding the influence of Keynes. I didn’t put the Keynes piece on the list, but perhaps I should have done. It’s only eight or nine pages long and you can find it easily online ."