Nature & Nature's God lay hid in night; God said, let Newton be, and all was light.
Newton was also personally vengeful; I think he not only wanted to disprove Leibnitz's priority in 'inventint' calculus, he wanted to utterly humiliate him.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Smith Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2011 1:36 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Have a happy and merry December 25
On Sun, 25 Dec 2011 05:24:17 +0000 (UTC) 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Actually, he was a bit of a nutter.
Really? He was quite religious, certainly, in his own odd way. And he thought there was something to alchemy. Is that what you're thinking of?
To be sure, he was a hard-money man. Certainly the least attractive trait in an otherwise fascinating character.
There's a nice 18th-century statue of old Isaac in the antechapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. Wordsworth (who was a student at the neighboring and less grand St John's college) could see it from his window:
---------- And from my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble image of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone. -----------
By all means let's hoist a glass to Isaac. Perhaps he couldn't have been so brilliant if he hadn't been so nutty. Considered in the round, he doesn't seem a very Hitchens-esque or Dawkinsonian figure.
-- --
Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk