Humphrey Newton's Recollections

In the last year of the reign of King Charles II, according to his own recollection, Humphrey Newton came to Trinity College, Cambridge, from Grantham School to be sizar to his great namesake, Isaac. Neither Newton admitted or claimed relationship with the other. Humphrey remained with Isaac for five years before returning to Grantham as a country physician, during which period he lived in some intimacy with the Lucasian Professor, chiefly serving as his copyist. John Conduitt, after Isaac's death, sought in 1728 Humphrey's recollections of him, first published by Brewster in 1855. With all its obvious imperfections and silliness, Humphrey's is the only personal record of Newton's daily life from someone who had every opportunity for close and long observation.

Humphrey was much more struck by Newton's manners than by his mind, which was beyond his appreciation. His only memory of the Principia, after having copied it, was that some of the scholars in Cambridge to whom Newton bade him take presentation copies, declared ‘that they might study seven years before they understood any thing of it’. (They might have spent seven years in worse ways.) He remembered that Newton kept a five-foot-long [refracting] telescope at the head of the stairs leading from his rooms to the garden below, but all he could say of Newton's study of astronomy was that ‘several of his observations about comets and the planets may be found scattered here and there in a book entitled The Elements of Astronomy by Dr. David Gregory.’

As will be evident from this biography, Newton carefully preserved his notebooks and papers, including his correspondence, throughout his life, accumulating a mass of folded bundles whose contents were not in all cases readily identifiable. After his death, as part of the settlement of his intestacy, John and Catherine Conduitt received undivided rights to this great mass. Only two manuscripts (The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and The System of the World) were found suitable for immediate sale to booksellers for publication; otherwise little from this mass reached print during the eighteenth century, even in Samuel Horsley's collected edition of Newton's writings (1779–85). While Horsley had been able to make only a cursory examination of the papers and remained unperceptive of their significance, Newton's first real biographer, Sir David Brewster, amended and amplified a book already in proof from biographical (and some other) materials selected for him by Henry Arthur Fellowes in 1837.

Fellowes was a nephew of the then Earl of Portsmouth, owner by inheritance of the Newton papers, which were preserved at his seat, Hurstbourne Park in Hampshire. His family name was Wallop; the younger Catherine Conduitt (Newton's ‘Kitty’) had married John Wallop in 1740, becoming titular Viscountess Lymington by the creation of the earldom of Portsmouth for her father-in-law in 1743.

Meanwhile, before Brewster's time many letters and documents sent by Newton to others (including Collins, Boyle and Locke) had reached print, as had extracts or paraphrases of the memoirs of Newton compiled by John Conduitt before and after Newton's death. Some of these Newtonian scraps have since been rejected as false.

Feelings of fatigue can be found in association with a number of physical and psychiatric conditions, and form part of the experiential meaning of technical and vulgar terms such as asthenia, anergy, tiredness, weariness, languor, lassitude, depression, melancholia, acedia, apathy, inertia, aboulia, lethargy, exhaustion, vecordia, tediousness, ennui, debility, lack of vitality, lack of vigour, pusillanimity, adynamia, boredom, feebleness, failing of strength, hyperaesthesis, irritability, anhedonia, ‘being out of sorts’, ‘out of being’, ‘feeling knackered’, and ‘down in the dumps’.

Before embarking on the history of these phenomena, the semantic field of ‘feelings of fatigue’ and cognate terms must be clarified; to do so five questions may be asked. The first is whether such terms have a common denominator; it would seem that they do partake in a ‘primary sensation’ conferring upon them a sort of ‘family resemblance’. The second question is whether such common sensation is distinctive enough to be differentiated from others such as mild pain; it will be shown that feelings of fatigue have been historically considered as a primary experience. The third question is whether it is distinctive enough to be recognized even when not accompanied by its usual causal associations, e.g. when experienced in situations not preceded by exertion; clinical observation shows that subjects respond with alarm to the presence of feeling of fatigue when it appears ‘unexplained’. The fourth question is whether this unexplained feeling of fatigue is phenomenologically identical to that experienced after exercise; the answer to this question must be sought in empirical research.

Newton served the State in a variety of capacities for thirty years; he not only embodied in his own person (as Pepys had formerly done at the Admiralty and his contemporary William Lowndes did at the Treasury) a novel conception of the high-ranking, efficient, professional civil servant, but helped to established the character of the English government official in the parliamentary age: as a man of integrity, unremitting in his attention to business, thoroughly competent in matters of detail yet no mere clerk – a head of department able to realize ministerial policy in concrete terms.

As we have seen, Newton's association with government began with his election as a university Member of Parliament for Cambridge in January 1689. After the thirteen months – including a long summer recess – of the Convention Parliament no one at Cambridge seems to have wished to propose Newton for a second term. Two years after his translation to the mastership of the Mint (25 December 1699) he was again nominated and elected Member of Parliament for the university. He is known to have supported Halifax and the Whig Junto on a vote of confidence but was in general no more obvious in the House of Commons than before. When the Parliament was dissolved after a few months (2 July 1702) Newton refused to stand again unless unopposed: ‘To solicit and miss for want of doing it sufficiently, would be a reflection upon me, and it's better to sit still.”

Leibniz and Newton

The link between Britain and G. W. Leibniz, now firmly stationed at Hanover though often travelling about Europe in the interests of his master, was decisively broken by the sudden death of Henry Oldenburg early in September 1677. A last letter from him to Leibniz had advised the philosopher to expect no speedy response to his recent mathematical letters from either Collins or Newton; the silence in fact was to last for fifteen years. Whether or not Newton would have been willing to carry on the correspondence with Leibniz, he lacked easy means to do so. Both Collins and Newton studied Leibniz's letters, however. We have no opinion at this stage about Leibniz's mathematical discoveries from Newton himself, but it would seem that he, Collins and John Wallis agreed that Leibniz had (like James Gregory) made an independent discovery of the ‘method of series’ based on the work of earlier mathematicians which he had developed in his own way, and to which he had added an improved ‘method of tangents’. Collins imagined (mistakenly) that Leibniz had gleaned something from Barrow's lectures, and suggested that the Royal Society might print Leibniz's letters to Oldenburg. He never hinted that Leibniz owed anything to Newton.

As previous chapters have shown, Newton did little to promote his calculus in the twenty years after 1671. Leibniz too gave few signs of his slumbering mathematical genius for eight years after leaving Paris.

Whilst the history of the neuroses in general, and that of hysteria, hypochondria and obsessive-compulsive disorder in particular, have received historical attention, the evolution of what is nowadays known as ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, ‘panic disorder’, and ‘phobia’ has been neglected. This may be due to their relative newness; or to the fact that the historical model used to account for the traditional nervous disorders is inappropriate for the new neuroses.

This does not mean that the individual symptoms now included under the ‘anxiety disorders’ are themselves new. Indeed, they have been known since time immemorial; the only difference being that, in the past, they were reported in different social and medical contexts. For example, during the eighteenth century such symptoms were considered to be specific diseases or, less frequently, included under the syndromic domain of other diseases. The novelty has been that, during the 1890s, these symptoms were rescued from their earlier niches and put together into what was then claimed were independent clinical conditions. The notion that these symptoms could all be the manifestation of a unitary construct called ‘anxiety’ is also new, at least is alien to pre-Freudian psychiatry. The historical and ideological factors that led to this state of affairs need disentangling.

By the 1860s, and before the final synthesis took place, such symptoms could be found in clinical realms as disparate as cardiovascular, inner ear, gastrointestinal, or neurological medicine. Basically, each symptom seems to have been taken at face value and treated as a real ‘physical’ complaint. This is one reason why they were mostly reported in medical (not psychiatric) journals.

As mentioned in Chapter 7, idiocy and dementia - the two syndromic forms of intellectual failure - were differentiated before Esquirol, although this alienist made their separation official. The history of acquired cognitive impairment, called here dementia for short, will also throw light on the history of the concept of cognition.

The current concept of dementia was constructed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process can be described as one of pruning down the heterogeneous clinical content of dementia. The process started before 1800 and culminated in the early 1900s in what I have called the ‘cognitive paradigm’, i.e. the view that dementia just consisted of an irreversible disorder of intellectual functions. Historical analysis shows that this view resulted more from ideology than clinical observation. For decades, the cognitive paradigm has prevented the adequate mapping of the non-cognitive symptoms of dementia and hindered research.

Dementia before the eighteenth century

Before 1700, terms such as amentia, imbecility, morosis, fatuitas, anoea, foolishness, stupidity, simplicity, cams, idiocy, dotage, and senility (but surprisingly not dementia) were used to name, in varying degree, states of cognitive and behavioural deterioration leading to psychosocial incompetence. The word dementia, which is almost as old as the oldest of those listed above (for example, it is already found in Lucretius) simply meant ‘being out of one's mind.’

Historically, the concept of ‘delusion’ is intertwined with that of ‘insanity’ and depends upon contemporary theories of thinking and belief. On the continent, and up to the 1850s, délire and Wahn referred to either madness or delusion (the French term also named ‘organic delirium’). Since the sixteenth century, the English word delusion has meant ‘fixed false opinion or belief with regard to objective things’ (OED, second edition). This intellectualist definition, albeit narrower, is easier to explore than its continental counterparts.

Delusions before the nineteenth century

Continental views

A good place to start is the French Encyclopédic where délire is defined as ‘an error of judgment by the spirit, during wakefulness, of things known to all.’ The author used the same word to refer to delusion and delirium and offered the same causal mechanism for both. Delusion and delirium were to be distinguished on the bases of aetiology, course, intensity, presence or absence of fever. All forms of délire were ‘organic’: ‘the soul is always in the same state and is not susceptible to change. So, the error of judgment that is délire cannot be attributed to the soul but to the disposition of the bodily organs.’ Tension and relaxation of nerves led to manic or melancholic délire, respectively; and according to the number of nervous fibres involved, délire was universal (organic delirium) or particular (delusion). Severity may range from mild to severe and was proportional to the ‘strength of internal sensations’. In délire internal sensations are stronger than external ones. In a first stage, internal sensations impinge upon consciousness but no judgment is made (i.e. the subject remains insightful); and in a third stage, emotions compound the picture.

Newton's Teaching in Cambridge

The greater part of Newton's original work in mathematics and science was first expressed in the form of university lectures. This is true of his researches in geometrical and experimental optics, of his discoveries in theoretical and celestial mechanics, and of his investigations in algebra and some other parts of mathematics. He never lectured upon calculus, no doubt believing that this topic was far beyond the reach of his student auditors; and he did not lecture either upon his chemical, alchemical, biblical and historical studies, not only for the reason that they lay far outside the scope of his professorship. The details of Newton's lecturing are formally known to us from the manuscripts of his optical lectures (in two versions), of the Arithmetica universalism and of the De motu corporum which he submitted to the University Library in accordance with the statutes of his professorship – or nearly so! These statutes, indeed, required the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics to deliver upwards of twenty lectures in each academic year, neatly written copies of ten of them to be deposited with the vice-chancellor in the following year. But although these statutes had been drawn up only in 1663, when the professorship was founded by Henry Lucas, their provisions were at once disobeyed. While his predecessor, Isaac Barrow, had probably lectured in two terms of each year, Newton went to the Schools in one only, half an hour being reckoned a near enough approach to the statutory ‘about one hour’.

The Reflecting Telescope

The close of the year 1671 was marked by the public appearance of Newton upon the national stage of the Royal Society of London. It is strange that with both Newton and his arch-rival Leibniz this event happened in the same unexpected and unlikely way: each of them presented a gadget to the Royal Society. In Leibniz's case it was an arithmetical machine, a toothed-wheel device of the type pioneered by Blaise Pascal, in Newton's his miniature reflecting telescope. Newton's introduction to the Society (December 1671) preceded Leibniz's by just over a year. Both men were, for their pains, severely mauled by Robert Hooke, with assertions that their inventions were valueless and much inferior to his own schemes. Both were deeply wounded by this reception, though also conscious of the warmer welcome extended to them by other Fellows of the Royal Society, not least its Secretary, Henry Oldenburg.

Newton and Leibniz certainly did not meet during this first visit of Leibniz to London (January–March 1673), though before long Collins would be sharing with Leibniz an outline of the mathematical progress accomplished by James Gregory and Isaac Newton. Yet curiously there may be a link between Leibniz and Newton's reflecting telescope. In a letter that Oldenburg received probably about 20 October 1671, Leibniz (writing about the innovations made by a young German optician) mentioned ‘Tubos Catadioptricos, quales mihi in mentem venerunt’ (‘reflecting-refracting tubes, such as occurred to my mind’). No explanation of this phrase has been found, but Newton had certainly invented a catadioptrical telescope.

The neologism anhedonie, coined by T. Ribot to name an ‘inability to experience pleasure’, has not yet made it into the most recent French psychiatric dictionary nor does its English version feature in OED. Its concomitant concept has merited both narrow (‘blocking of the reward reinforcement of usually reinforcing stimuli’) and broad formulations (‘loss of interest or pleasure in all or almost all usual activities and pastimes’). The behaviour to which anhedonia refers is not new: indeed, by the time of its coining it had already been reported in patients with ‘melancholia’ who were incapable of ‘feeling joy any more’. The term first took root in the psychoanalytic literature, and in English-speaking psychiatry came into currency after 1979. (The same holds true for France and Germany.) Legitimated by DSM III and recently by ICD-10, anhedonia is now considered as a ‘symptom’ of two important clinical conditions (depression and schizophrenia). More empirical evidence is, however, required to confirm that the clinical phenomena in question are the same in both cases.

Anhedonia is a multivocal term. This partially results from the fact that the concept on which it is grounded is parasitical upon the ever changing definition of pleasure, i.e. of ‘the condition of consciousness or sensation induced by the enjoyment or anticipation of what is felt or viewed as good or desirable; enjoyment, delight, gratification’ (my italics). However, because it is not even known whether ‘there is something fundamental which is common to enjoying something, getting satisfaction out of something, being pleased at something, feeling good and so on’ (my italics). the definition of anhedonia is bound to be multiple and fuzzy.

The history of mental symptoms during the nineteenth century can be explored from four complementary perspectives: descriptive psychopathology (DP), aetiological theory, pathogenesis and taxonomy. DP refers to the language of description, aetiology to underlying causes, pathogenesis to the mechanisms that disrupt brain structure and /or function which, in turn, generate symptoms, and taxonomy to the clustering rules which govern symptom grouping. DP (also called ‘psychiatric semiology’ in Continental countries) owes much to eighteenth century theory of signs; psychiatric aetiological theory and pathogenesis were moulded upon nineteenth century developments in general medicine; and taxonomy grew out of metaphors of order and classificatory principles developed during the Enlightenment. This book deals exclusively with the history of DP and enjoins historians to tackle the remainder, i.e. the history of psychiatric aetiological theory, pathogenesis and taxonomy during the nineteenth century on which, so far, near to nothing of substance has been written.

The development of DP

Inter alia, DP can be defined as a descriptive-cum-cognitive system designed to capture aspects of abnormal behaviour. This it does by applying words to segments of speech and action. To achieve its purpose, two components are needed: a lexicon and segments (symptoms or referents) which have to be ‘outlined’ or ‘constructed’. Since the latter are not obviously delimited or tagged, the naming function of DP often entails fracturing the behaviour presented by mentally ill patients. Furthermore, since the resulting ‘fragments’ are not equally informational, only some need to be kept. The rules for such a decision are based on nosological and aetiological theories of mental illness.

Warden of the Mint, 1696

It is a fair guess that Newton was never fully content with his professorial and collegiate life in Cambridge after the university had sent him to Parliament in 1689. Indeed, it may be that his eye began to rove as early as 1687, in the period of lassitude that must inevitably have followed the intense and exciting task of bringing the Principia to a conclusion in the summer of that year. By that time the acquaintance or friendship between Samuel Pepys PRS and Isaac Newton must have been established; besides the Royal Society, Christ's Hospital mathematical school had brought the two men together. Pepys was then at the height of his career and of his influence. At the peak of his psychological crisis in 1693 Newton wrote to Pepys: “I never designed to get anything by your interest, or King James favour,” an obvious allusion to days before the Revolution, after which Pepys's influence was nil. If we may read this anxious denial as evidence that there really was some such talk or manoeuvre (as with Newton's parallel denial to Locke), it must have occurred in 1687 or 1688.

Similarly and in the same disturbed frame of mind, Newton wrote to Locke: “I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking that there was a designe to sell me an office.” In this case, letters do hint at Locke's enlisting the help of the Earl of Monmouth (a favourite of William Ill's and recently First Lord of the Treasury) who had been a patron of Locke himself.

Our society depends upon science, and yet to many of us what scientists do is a mystery. The sciences are not just collections of facts, but are ordered by theory, and this is where Einstein's famous phrase about science being a free creation of the human mind comes in. Science is a fully human activity; the personalities of those who practise it are important in its progress and often interesting to us. Looking at the lives of scientists is a way of bringing science to life.

By the time of his death in 1727 Newton stood as the representative figure of modern science. His name was something to conjure with, evoking ideas of the absent-minded professor, the solitary genius, and the power of mathematical and experimental science to answer questions about the world. He became a key figure in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and his work correspondingly aroused unease among Romantics who saw his science as inhuman and reductive.

A mythical Newton, a new Adam born on Christmas Day and nourished by an apple from the tree of knowledge, came to obscure the real man who had worked in dynamics, astronomy and optics, and less successfully in chemistry, to synthesize the work of great predecessors such as Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Boyle. Rupert Hall comes to this biography after editing the correspondence of both Newton himself and also Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society and the editor of its journal. He has also edited some of Newton's unpublished papers.