The achievement of Isaac Newton

Abstract

Although Isaac Newton's interests were not confined to mathematical topics, neither did he embrace all learning. What seized his at tention seized it completely, to the exclusion of everything else, and his intellectual life presents itself to the historian as a succession of episodes in which Newton devoted himself utterly to the subject at hand and made himself fully its master. In no sense can we see him in the image of the universal man of the Renaissance. He remained a stranger to many arenas of experience--for example, the arts in most of their manifestations. Even what we today consider as science did not define the limits of Newton's intellectual life. We know f rom his manusc r ip t s tha t he devo ted immense amounts of time and attention to alchemy, during a period of nearly thirty years in the middle of his life when he was at the height of his powers. Newton devoted even more attention to theology also during the prime years of his life. Although passages in the General Scholium to the Principia and in the Queries attached to the Opticks argue that the structure of nature implies the existence of God, such questions were by no means the focus of his concern in theology, which centered instead on the interrelated doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. To this catalog of interests we should also add Newton's duties at the Mint, for he plunged into them with the same singleminded concentration he had given to other matters. History has not weighed these interests on the same scales that Newton used. Alchemy was already beginning to slip beyond the pale of intellectual respectability at the time Newton took it up. Newton later abandoned alchemy; it was the one pursuit of his Cambridge years that did not travel with him to London. Theology has experienced a different history from alchemy, but it has ended up as far removed from the