![]() There are no private diaries, and hardly any of his correspondence touches on details of his private life or state of mind. ![]() Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that Newton’s defensive secretiveness makes it extremely difficult to form a full and balanced assessment of his character. It has also been suggested - though this is purely conjectural and much disputed - that he was a repressed homosexual, which if true would undoubtedly have placed a man of his background and upbringing under extreme mental strain. It should be said that such an arrangement was not particularly unusual in the mid-seventeenth century, but that does not in itself rule out the possibility - if not the likelihood - that this early experience of loss and betrayal permanently damaged Newton’s capacity for trust and close friendship. When he was barely three years old, his mother remarried and moved into the home of her new husband Barnabas Smith, leaving the infant Isaac in the care of her own parents until Smith’s death some seven years later, when she came back, bringing with her two daughters and a son from her second marriage. Many post-Freudian biographers (and not only fully paid-up Freudians) trace the roots of Newton’s insecurity and aggressiveness to his earliest years. He seems, however, to have made a full recovery by the end of the year. I answered twere better if you were dead’ (it is not clear whether Newton really did tell anyone this or merely imagined that he had). He later confessed to Locke that during this crisis, ‘when one told me you were sickly. His psychological problems culminated in what would now be called a nervous breakdown in mid-1693, when, after five nights of sleeping ‘not a wink’, he temporarily lost all grip on reality and became convinced that his friends Locke and Pepys were conspiring against him. Yet he was also capable of great generosity and kindness, and there is no lack of tributes to his affability and hospitality, at least in his later years. The most famous example of this is his carefully-orchestrated campaign to destroy the reputation of Gottfried Leibniz, who he believed (quite unfairly) had stolen the discovery of calculus from him. Even in his maturity, having become rich, famous, laden with honours and internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s foremost thinkers, he remained deeply insecure, given to fits of depression and outbursts of violent temper, and implacable in pursuit of anyone by whom he felt threatened. ![]() ![]() Especially in the earlier part of his life, Newton was a deeply introverted character and fiercely protective of his privacy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |