The personality of Isaac Newton

Abstract

In conversation with Mr Conduitt a little before his death, Sir Isaac said: I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. 1 This life of apparent serenity was, however, far from the truth, for Newton is well known to have had a most complex and difficult personality. William Whiston (1667-1752), Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who became Newton’s deputy in the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge in 1701, wrote of him that he had ‘the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper, that I ever knew.’ 2 And John Flamsteed, F.R.S. (1646-1719), a member of Jesus College, Cambridge, who was appointed first Astronomer Royal by Charles II in 1675, declared after quarrelling with Newton, that he was ‘insidious, ambitious, and excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction’. 3 According to Frank E. Manuel, writing in 1968, in the 1690s Newton ‘broke with his friends, crawled into a comer, accused his intimates of plotting against him, and reported conversations that never took place.’ 4