Newton Demands the Muse. Newton's "Opticks" and the Eighteenth Century Poets by MarjorieHope NicolsonReview by: I. Bernard CohenIsis, Vol. 38, No. 1/2 (Nov., 1947), pp. 115-116Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/225464 .

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Reviews 115

an Inspector at Scotland Yard. His main duty was to detect and prosecute counterfeiters and clippers. At that time the punishment for coun- terfeiting was death. After three years, on the death of the Master Worker, Newton was ap- pointed Master. The Master was administrative head of the Mint. He held the post until his death in I727.

Although residences were available at the mint for officers and workers, Newton never lived there. To his work Newton always applied his scholar's methods. He read and quoted at great length from the Mint Records and always searched for a precedent. He mastered the as- saying of gold and silver, being handy with his hands. He brought a stability to the Mint which neither his predecessors nor his successors did.

Some interesting problems in economics are discussed and it is of interest to see anticipations of modern things like the OPA.

The book is not without bits of humor. A Deputy Comptroller at Exeter, found short in his accounts, next occupied the post of Ambas- sador to the Pirates of Madagascar. Colorado Springs, Colorado Duane Studley

MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON: Newton de- mands the muse. Newton's "Opticks" and the eighteenth century poets. xi+I78 pp. Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, I946. (The History of Ideas series, 2). $2.00.

The preface to this book informs us that while Miss Nicolson was "reading widely in eighteenth century poetry for other purposes," she con- sistently found "references to Newton which had nothing to do with the Principia," and eventu- ally "became persuaded that, among the poets, the Opticks was even more familiar than was the more famous work." This book, therefore, "in- sisted upon being written, and by that insistence interrupted work on a larger volume upon which I was engaged."

Miss Nicolson notes that during recent years critics have become increasingly aware of the impact of "Newtonian theories" upon the lit- erary imagination and that, in their discussions, these critics have concerned themselves almost entirely with the magnum opus, the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Her aim in this work is to demonstrate the part of Newtonian- ism represented by the Opticks. Hitherto every one has known that the Opticks had a profound influence (if negative) on at least one poet, Goethe, whose damnation of Newton was as violent as that of Haydon and Keats in their famous toast, and that of William Blake (the latter, the subject of an epilogue to Miss Nicol- son's book). With the publication of Miss Nicol- son's book, we must now take into consideration, when dealing with Newtonianism or the En- lightenment, that the Opticks had a wide and profound influence. The "scientific" poets she discusses ". . . labored to understand the physics

of light, and still more the physics of sight, be- coming acutely aware of the structure and func- tion of the human eye, that mysterious liaison between the world 'out there' and the mind 'in here.'" As "philosophical" poets, they ". grappled with the supposed 'metaphysics' of the Opticks - as interpreted particularly by Locke - read- ing into Newton philosophical profundities which he himself would have regretted." Miss Nicolson's general conclusions are: In their response to the "science" of color and light in the Opticks, we shall find the poets of the first half- century unanimous in their agreement and their praise. They will agree well enough, too, in the "aesthetic" they developed. When we face the implications of the supposed "metaphysics," however, we shall see them parting company, and shall find significant differences between the three major poems of 1744, Young's Night Thoughts, Akenside's The Pleasures of the Imagination, and Thomson's Seasons, each of which, in its way, was a "Newtonian" poem.

Except for Richard Jago, all the poetry discussed in this book was written between I727 when "great Newton" died and I756-57, a terminal date selected "because of the publication at that time of Burke's Enquiry."

Miss Nicolson amply documents her thesis that during the period under consideration the poets were not only concerned to incorporate into their work the symbolism of light, but to do so in more or less Newtonian terms. They adopted the Newtonian theory of colors (as developed by the prismatic experiments on dispersion) and the Newtonian explanation of the rainbow; but they also discussed problems of other kinds sug- gested by passages in the Opticks. For example, Young queried in Night Thoughts as to whether, as a result of light having a finite velocity, there might be beams "sent out at Nature's birth" which came from astronomical bodies so distant that they were not yet received on the earth. This poem was written in I744, fifteen years after James Bradley had published in the Phil- osophical Transactions his discovery of aberra- tion and his independent confirmation of Roe- mer's discovery that light has a finite speed; one is led to wonder how much more than Newton's Opticks alone was responsible for this sentiment of Young's, as well as other references to optical phenomena cited throughout her book by Miss Nicolson.

In contrast to the Principia any one could then as now take up the Opticks with no special preparation and read it intelligently. Here, espe- cially in the Queries, one could find many items of as much, if not more, interest theologically than the General Scholium to the Principia, viz.: . . . it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, inpenetrable, mov- able Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conducted to the End for which he form'd them....

. . . How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what Ends were their several

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iI6 Reviews Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without knowledge of Sounds?

It should have come as no surprise, then, that the Opticks was popular in the eighteenth cen- tury, and that it may have been, to use again Miss Nicolson's phrase, "even better known to laymen" than the Principia. Yet this fact, so obvious once it is declared, awaited Miss Nicol- son's expert and careful documentation for its validity to be appreciated, so that eventually it may be incorporated in general works on the Enlightenment, which have hitherto usually dis- cussed Newtonianism wholly in terms of the Principia. Miss Nicolson's exposition of the vogue of the Opticks makes clear that, at least among poets and educated laymen, there was a sufficient vogue of the Opticks as opposed to the Principia for us to inquire as to whether there was a similar vogue among scientists. This ques- tion must be investigated in detail by analyzing the writings of many scientific writers in order to discover which Newtonian elements in their thoughts derive from the Opticks and which from the Principia either directly, or indirectly through the many commentators and expositors. This reviewer believes that Miss Nicolson's investiga- tion of the importance of the Opticks, and the possibility of a Newtonian tradition stemming separately from that work rather than the Prin- cipia, may well lead to a complete revision of traditionally held ideas concerning the scientific thought of the eighteenth century.

Those who dealt with science on the experi- mental level, who sought explanations of a manipulative kind, i.e., explanations which ac- counted for the experiment at hand and which predicted new possible experiments, must neces- sarily have been interested more in the Opticks, where such explanations (we dare not say hy- potheses) took the form of Queries.

Thus, to account for the phenomenon known today as Newton's rings, which Newton knew must be explained by a periodic phenomenon, he introduced the idea of waves. But he rejected Huygens' wave concept as being inconsistent with the fact of light having "sides" (polariza- tion: it never occurred to Newton, nor to Huy- gens, that the waves might be transverse!). Wishing to account for a wave phenomenon in terms of the atoms that ". . . God in the begin- ning formed . . . ," he queried whether: . . .when a Ray of Light falls upon the Surface of any pellucid Body, and is there refracted or reflected, may not Waves or Vibrations, or Tremors, be thereby excited in the refracting or reflecting Medium . . . ? And do they not overtake the Rays of Light, and by overtaking them successively, do they not put them into the Fits of easy Reflexion and easy Transmission described above?

Here we have a man trying to explain to him- self how possibly the data of experiment may be accounted for on the manipulative level; how if such and such happens to so and so, then will not the result be thus and thus. No proof of it I No experiment to indicate its validity! Just a

tentative explanation in the simplest language, much as every scientist still proceeds in the stages when he is ordering his experiments and trying to connect them into a reasonable pattern; in the stage, that is, before the application of mathematics is possiblel

Newton's Principia could be mathematicized because the kind of reasoning just described and the collection of data had largely been done for him by his predecessors: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, and many others. Only the last grand generalizations were necessary, and the derivation of their mathematical conse- quences; but awaiting that great genius who, in his own words, was able to see further than others because he was able to stand on the shoulders of giants. But in the case of the Opticks, Newton was simply one of the giants on whose shoulders later men would stand. For a full understanding of the experimental data New- ton collected, especially those on the "inflec- tion" of light (defraction phenomena), a similar mathematicisation could not be achieved until after the passage of about one hundred years, until the labors of Young and Fresnel accom- plished for the subject of optics what Newton himself had done for celestial mechanics. The idea of universal attraction may in this light be compared to the principle of interference of transverse vibrations.

Miss Nicolson's important book may thus well mark the turning point in the history of our ideas about Newtonianism. The extent to which the thinkers of the Enlightenment depended on either the Opticks or the Principia, or mixtures of both, is a question to be decided in the future. But, even now, we can no longer base our ideas of Newtonianism wholly on the Principia and its interpreters.

In order amply to document her thesis, Miss Nicolson quotes so extensively from her subject poets that her book may at once be considered an historical investigation and a Newtonian an- thology. Although I have pointed out in this review only the significance of this book for our understanding of scientific thought, it is of equal importance for those interested in understanding the aesthetic and literary canons of the age of the Enlightenment. Literary students will surely want to investigate the basis of Miss Nicolson's statement that:

. . . Ironically enough, the very qualities which damned the eighteenth century poets in the eyes of nineteenth century critics have been in part responsible for the pres- ent "revival" in which they bid fair to displace those earlier idols of the "intellectual" poets and critics of our time, the "metaphysicals" of the seventeenth century.

While this thesis will be debated, we can all be grateful for Miss Nicolson's contribution to our understanding of "Newton with his prism and silent face," his "mind for ever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone."

I. Bernard Cohen

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