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Endeavour

Vol. 38 No. 3–4

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There is grandeur in this view of

Newton: Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton

and Victorian conceptions of scientiﬁc

virtue

Richard Bellon

Michigan State University, United States

For Victorian men of science, the scientiﬁc revolution of

the seventeenth century represented a moral awaken-

ing. Great theoretical triumphs of inductive science ﬂo-

wed directly from a philosophical spirit that embraced

the virtues of self-discipline, courage, patience and hu-

mility. Isaac Newton exempliﬁed this union of moral and

intellectual excellence. This, at least, was the story

crafted by scientiﬁc leaders like David Brewster, Thomas

Chalmers, John Herschel, Adam Sedgwick and William

Whewell. Not everyone accepted this reading of history.

Evangelicals who decried the ‘materialism’ of main-

stream science assigned a different meaning to New-

ton’s legacy on behalf of their ‘scriptural’ alternative.

High-church critics of science like John Henry Newman,

on the other hand, denied that Newton’s secular

achievements carried any moral signiﬁcance at all. These

debates over Newtonian standards of philosophical be-

havior had a decisive inﬂuence on Charles Darwin as he

developed his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Charles Darwin started and ended the

Origin of Species

genuﬂecting to the legacy of Isaac Newton.

The

Origin’s

famous closing sentence invoked the most

iconic of all scientiﬁc laws, universal gravitation. ‘There is

grandeur in this view of life,’ Darwin wrote of his theory of

evolution by natural selection, ‘with its several powers,

having been originally breathed into a few forms or one;

and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according

to the ﬁxed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have

been, and are being, evolved.’

The introductory paragraph (Figure

does not make a

similarly direct reference to the Newtonian inheritance but

the connection – one that would not have been missed by

his contemporaries – was no less signiﬁcant for remaining

unspoken. Darwin noted that while a naturalist aboard

HMS

Beagle

he had been ‘much struck’ by the relationship

Corresponding author:

Bellon, R. (bellonr@msu.edu).

Charles Darwin,

On the origin of species

(London, 1859), 490.

Available online 11 November 2014

between the geographical distribution of living and fossil

species in South America. Upon return to England, he

decided that he might start with these curious patterns

to launch an investigation into the origin of species. To that

end, he began ‘patiently accumulating and reﬂecting on all

sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.

After ﬁve years’ work I allowed myself to speculate on the

subject’. He shared these personal details ‘to show that I

have not been hasty in coming to a decision.’

Darwin ended the

Origin

on an appropriately bold note.

His book encircled a vast array of biological facts within the

explanatory framework of evolution by natural selection.

The success of this ambition relied on the type of philo-

sophical restraint afﬁrmed in the opening paragraph. This

restraint meant hewing to the technical procedures of the

inductive method, the branch of reasoning concerned with

ascending from particulars to general principles. Darwin

adhered strictly to the inductive method because, as

Michael Ruse observes, he ‘wanted to make his theory

as Newtonian as possible’.

The moral signiﬁcance of the inductive method

The practice of induction drew on far more than an intel-

lectual awareness of rules of reasoning. For Victorian men

of science, the scientiﬁc revolution of the seventeenth

century represented a glorious moral awakening that

allowed man to direct the noblest qualities of his nature

toward the discovery of natural truth. The struggles and

successes of seventeenth-century natural philosophers –

Newton’s above all others – revealed what was possible

when men disciplined their imagination and renounced

their vanity with patience, humility and courage.

Darwin’s contemporaries in the scientiﬁc elite, from

clergymen who grew up in under the specter of the French

Revolution to agnostics born well after Waterloo, shared

the conviction that the practice of induction drew on the

Darwin,

Origin of species,

Michael Ruse,

The Darwinian revolution: science red in tooth and claw

(Chicago,

1979), 176. See also Jonathon Hodge, ‘The notebook programmes and the projects of

Darwin’s London years,’ in Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds),

The Cambridge com-

panion to Darwin,

2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2009), 53–4.

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Endeavour

Vol. 38 No. 3–4

223

Figure 1.

The opening page of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

deeper qualities of a man’s character. The investigator

must submit his theories to extensive testing, weary and

time-consuming work that often destroyed cherished

notions. There could be no appeal of nature’s verdict. ‘If

a man be not capable of this self-renunciation – this loyal

surrender of himself to Nature, he lacks, in my opinion, the

ﬁrst mark of a true philosopher,’ the physicist John Tyndall

pronounced in 1854 at the Royal Institution in the heart of

scientiﬁc London.

Darwin concluded the

Origin

by embed-

ding it into the ongoing intellectual drama sparked by the

scientiﬁc revolution; he could only do this because he

grappled with the moral legacy of that revolution in the

inaugural paragraph.

The reliance of inductive philosophy on moral behavior

provided a powerful means to reconcile science and religion

at a time when the advance of natural knowledge appeared

to threaten traditional belief. William Paley in his 1805

Natural Theology

articulated a charming, conﬁdent and

forceful argument for God’s direct creative activity in the

natural world. A quarter of a century later, however, it was

clear that this vision of a largely static nature designed by

an artisan God had failed to keep pace with advances in

astronomy, geology or natural history. As Jonathan Top-

ham shows, the

Bridgewater Treatises

of the 1830s –

commissioned from a bequest in the will of the eight Earl

of Bridgewater to produce works celebrating the power,

wisdom and goodness of God – represented God’s creative

John Tyndall, ‘On the importance of the study of physics as a branch of education

for all classes’, in

Lectures on education: delivered at the Royal Institution of Great

Britain

(London, 1854), 190–1. Compare Tyndall’s comments to John Herschel,

preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy

(London, 1831), 80–1.

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agency largely, though by no means exclusively, in His

creation of universal laws of nature.

William Whewell in his 1833

Bridgewater

entry on

astronomy and general physics stated bluntly that ‘with

regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as

this – we can perceive that events are brought about not by

insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each

particular case, but by the establishment of general laws’ –

although he pointedly treated the direct creation of species

as a crucial exception to this general rule.

Two years

earlier he had argued vigorously in the pages of the con-

servative

British Critic

that the ‘pious and religious’ could

with peace of mind leave the studies of geology, zoology and

astronomy, ‘where they ought to be, in the hands of the

natural philosopher’. The natural philosopher earned his

liberty, Whewell explained, through a diligent and self-

denying approach to investigation.

Newton’s towering

reputation offered a potent example of the conﬂuence

between moral behavior, philosophical rigor and piety.

Darwin graduated from Cambridge in 1831 (Figure

2),

little over a century after Newton’s death. Yet for those in

Cambridge, at least according to Whewell, ‘we feel as if

Newton had passed from among us only yesterday.’

When

Darwin returned from the

Beagle

voyage in 1836 he joined

a coterie of expert specialists who believed that ultimate

scientiﬁc authority, and the cultural inﬂuence which ﬂo-

wed from it, should remain exclusively in their hands – not

because they were experts, but rather because acquisition

of expertise marked self-renunciation to natural truth.

Newton embodied a prevalent understanding of the philo-

sophical character which underwrote this relationship

between intellectual and moral excellence, and excellence

and cultural authority. These claims of authority served as

points of conﬂict during what Whewell aptly called ‘stirring

and angry times’.

So-called scriptural geologists invoked

Newton’s legacy in order to undercut non-biblical-literalist

theories of the earth’s history and structure advanced by

geologists like Darwin’s mentors Adam Sedgwick and

Charles Lyell. High-church conservatives, fretful that

science’s cultural pretensions would trespass on the au-

thority of the established Church of England, scoffed bit-

terly at the notion that the practice of science could teach

moral duty.

The multifaceted debates over Newton’s legacy provided

a ﬁeld on which various parties fought over the proper role

of science in a rapidly changing society. Darwin wrapped

his method – morally as well as intellectually – in the

mantle of patient and disciplined Newtonian science to

locate the

Origin

at a particular place within this battle-

scarred cultural landscape. He needed to demonstrate

Jonathan Topham, ‘‘Biology in the Service of Natural Theology: Paley, Darwin,

and the

Bridgewater Treatises,’’

in Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (eds),

Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins

(Chicago, 2010), 88–113.

William Whewell,

Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to

Natural Theology

(London, 1833), 38–41, 356.

William Whewell, ‘‘Lyell’s Principles of Geology,’’

British Critic

9 (1831), 180–5,

205–6.

William Whewell, ‘Reply to the toast of the University of Cambridge,’ in Edmund

Fillingham King (ed),

A biographical sketch of Sir Isaac Newton, to which are added

reports of the oration of lord Brougham at Grantham,

2nd ed. (Grantham, 1858), 101.

William Whewell, ‘Science and the English universities’,

British Critic

9 (1831),

71. See Boyd Hilton

A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous people? England 1783–1846

(Oxford,

2006) esp. 32.

224

Endeavour

Vol. 38 No. 3–4

Figure 2.

A bronze statue of Charles Darwin as a Cambridge undergraduate by

Anthony Smith. Darwin’s Garden, Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Photo by author.

that, while his fellow experts might not accept all of his

conclusions, they could not justly indict him for violating

the correct principles of scientiﬁc investigation.

Under-

standing the long shadow Newton cast across the nine-

teenth century reveals that stable norms of

virtue

were

central to the metaphysical and methodological construc-

tion of modern science – and never more so than in the

controversies over Darwinism.

The inductive method made ﬂesh

The conviction that moral integrity depended upon behav-

ior was grounded deeply in religion. The natural theologian

Paley wrote in the late eighteenth century that the moral

creed of Christianity emerged not merely from what Jesus

said but from how he lived: ‘the

character of Christ

is a part

of the morality of the Gospel.’

Religious belief served no

purpose if it did not spur Christians to fulﬁll their duties

and to scorn iniquity.

Indeed, belief itself was something

one

did

rather than simply professed. Thomas Rawson

Birks, Whewell’s student and a successor in Cambridge’s

See Charles Darwin to John Stevens Henslow, 8 May [1860], in Frederick

Burkhardt and others (eds),

Correspondence of Charles Darwin,

21 vols. (Cambridge,

1985-), 8: 195. For analysis of how Darwin overcame stiff initial resistance to convince

colleagues and the broader public of his scientiﬁc virtue, see Richard Bellon, ‘‘Inspi-

ration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany and the Triumph of Evolution,

1859–1868,’’

Isis,

102 (2011), 392–420.

For the importance of ‘‘virtue’’ in science, see Steven Shapin’s books,

A Social

History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England

(Chicago, 1994)

and

The Scientiﬁc Life: A Moral History of a Late-Modern Vocation

(Chicago, 2008).

For the stability of norms of virtue in Victorian Britain, see Stefan Collini

Public

Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930

(Oxford,

1991), esp. 64; and Richard Bellon,

A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying

Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736–1859

(Leiden, 2014).

William Paley,

A view of the evidences of Christianity,

annotations by Richard

Whately (New York, 1865), 242.

William Paley,

Sermons on various subjects,

2 vols., edited by Edmund Paley

(London, 1825), 1: 79.

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chair of moral philosophy, built off of this perspective in a

supplementary treatise to Paley’s

Horæ Paulinæ.

The light

of Christ’s character, said Birks, invested the lessons of

scripture with ‘a moral power and a hold on the conscience,

which precepts alone, however pure and excellent, could

never secure.’

The basic logic about the power of lived precedent

extended beyond religion. Richard Altick observes that

‘the energies that had once been devoted to the veneration

of saints and martyrs, the original objects of English

biography, now were redirected. A new race of heroes

was in the making.’

In the eighteenth century, Samuel

Johnson wrote extensively that knowledge only progressed

through ‘emulous diligence’ and humility. Someone ‘wise in

his own conceit,’ Johnson declared, would never submit

himself to the laborious work required for genuine discov-

ery. ‘Knowledge is to be attained by slow and gradual

acquisitions, by a careful review of our ideas,’ he wrote,

‘and a regular superstructure of one proposition on anoth-

er; and is, therefore, the reward only of diligence and

patience.’

Among Darwin’s contemporaries Thomas Car-

lyle and Samuel Smiles found wide audiences for their

homilies on the value of self-discipline and perseverant

work. Charles Dickens declared patience ‘the greatest

Christian virtue’.

The liberal Anglican Thomas Arnold

and the conservative high-churchman John Henry New-

man waged bitter campaigns against each other’s princi-

ples from the early 1830s until Arnold’s untimely early

death in 1842. Their disagreement ran so hot that each

man wondered whether the other deserved to be consid-

ered a Christian at all.

And yet they agreed entirely on

the nature of our moral duty: ‘self-denial, humility, devo-

tion, and charity’ (Arnold); ‘generosity, self-denial, and

high-minded patience’ (Newman).

The reverence showered on secular heroes redirected

rather than replaced religious impulses. The example of a

great man like Newton acquired a glow of divine authority

by illustrating what virtue could accomplish even in our

fallen state. There were two interlocking reasons for New-

ton’s preeminence. The unparalleled reach of his discover-

ies illustrated the power of induction. The supposed purity

of his nature in turn illustrated the intimate connection

between philosophical method and the dictates of Chris-

tian piety. Francis Bacon, who codiﬁed the rules of induc-

tion before Newton, remained a Victorian touchstone. But

Bacon, for all of his cleverness and insight, did not offer a

living example of inductive philosophy. A technical system

of rules for scientiﬁc observation and experiment did not

provide the same practical guidance and moral inspiration

as the hard-won achievement of a human being who

surmounted the temptations and afﬂictions of life. The

Thomas Rawson Birks,

Horæ apostolicæ,

supplementary treatise to

Horæ Paulinæ

by William Paley (London, 1850), 407.

Richard D. Altick,

Lives and letters: a history of literary biography in England and

America

(New York, 1965), 29, 77–111.

Samuel Johnson,

The Yale edition of the works of Samuel Johnson,

18 vols., W.J.

Bate and others, editors (New Haven, 1958–2005), 5: 56–8, 14: 89–95.

Charles Dickens, ‘A popular delusion,’

Household words

1 (1850): 217.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,

The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold,

2 vols.

(London, 1844), 2: 43. John Henry Newman,

Apologia pro vita sua

(London, 1864), 98.

Thomas Arnold,

Principles of church reform

(London, 1833), 30. John Henry

Newman,

Sermons, chieﬂy on the theory of religious belief, preached before the Uni-

versity of Oxford

(London, 1843), 78.

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Vol. 38 No. 3–4

225

Scottish physicist David Brewster went so far as to deny

Bacon any profound signiﬁcance in the history of science

because, in his view, Bacon simply translated truisms into

cold technicalities while Newton’s trials and triumphs

demonstrated ‘the realities of human feelings’.

While

most of Brewster’s contemporaries looked more kindly

on Bacon, the broad point still held. Bacon legislated at

a distance on what the scientiﬁc investigator

should

do;

Newton revealed what he

could

do, with the right combi-

nation of imagination and self-discipline. Newton was the

inductive method made ﬂesh. He was so important not

because he was one of kind, but the best of his kind.

Nature acts by natural laws

John Stevens Henslow, Cambridge’s professor of botany,

nurtured Darwin’s transition from a young outdoor hobby-

ist to a capable working naturalist. Henslow in turn intro-

duced his disciple to the intimidating Whewell, then

professor of mineralogy, and Sedgwick, the charismatic

professor of geology. Whewell pressed into Darwin’s hands

A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philoso-

phy.

This book by John Herschel, Whewell’s friend from

undergraduate days, served as a philosophical template for

everything Darwin subsequently accomplished in science.

Henslow, Whewell, Sedgwick and Herschel taught the

young Darwin what the inductive method required.

The connection Darwin drew at the end of the

Origin

between evolutionary descent and planetary motion had

ﬁgured into his thought from the start of his theorizing. In

1837 he jotted down in his ﬁrst transmutation notebook

that astronomers might assign the ‘destiny’ of each planet

to the intercession of God; ‘but,’ he reﬂected, ‘how much

more simple & sublime powers let attraction act according

to certain law such are inevitable consequen[ces].’ In the

same vein, he continued, naturalists might credit each

individual species to God’s direct creative activity, but a

much more satisfying explanation assigned their origin to

the operation of general law.

‘This principle, that

nature acts by general laws,

is the

basis of all Philosophy, and the investigation of these laws

is the object of Science,’ the twenty-ﬁve-year-old Whewell

declared in his ﬁrst book,

An Elementary Treatise on

Mechanics

(1819).

The search for natural law was not

limited to the inorganic world. Henslow codiﬁed a decade of

university teaching in

Description and Physiological Bota-

(1835). He deﬁned botany’s progress around the devel-

opment of laws of increasing generality.

These two

textbooks, read in isolation, might suggest that science

was an aridly specialized pursuit – an impression that they

and their friends took great pains to counter in other

forums. Whewell devoted his long and proliﬁc career to

building a stable and sophisticated intellectual infrastruc-

ture for his youthful claim about nature and general laws.

His monumental works

History of the Inductive Sciences

(1837) and

Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences

(1840)

Margaret Gordon,

The home life of Sir David Brewster

(Edinburgh, 1869), 126–9.

See also David Brewster,

The life of Sir Isaac Newton

(London, 1831), 330–4.

Charles Darwin, Notebook B: [Transmutation of species (1837–1838)], transcribed

by Kees Rookmaaker (Darwin Online,

http://darwin-online.org.uk/),

101.

William Whewell,

An elementary treatise on mechanics

(Cambridge, 1819), 2.

John Stevens Henslow,

The principles of descriptive and physiological botany

(London, 1835).

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worked out on vast canvases his views on the quest of

ever-more general laws; so too did his writing and teaching

as Cambridge’s professor of moral philosophy from 1838 to

1855. Science was not just a body of useful knowledge but,

as Henslow explained in his 1848 address in the new

Ipswich Museum, a vehicle for the ‘the general advantage

of man, as a social being and as a moral agent.’

Patricia Fara, Rebekah Higgitt and Richard Yeo dem-

onstrate that the Victorians used Newton as a mold in

which they could cast their social, intellectual and moral

ideals.

The nature of these ideals, and Newton’s relation-

ship to them, becomes clear by looking at the 1833 meeting

in Cambridge of the recently founded British Association

for the Advancement of Science. The association’s leaders

would over the next several decades appoint themselves

with great success as guides and guardians of moral and

physical science. The Cambridge meeting proved pivotal,

as Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray show, in deﬁning the

distinct identity and powerful national role that was in the

association’s immediate future.

Those present at the

Cambridge meeting included ‘the very

elite

of the nation

in philosophy,’ marveled the Scottish evangelical theolo-

gian and moral philosopher Thomas Chalmers.

Darwin

at the time was collecting specimens from his base in

Maldonado, ‘a most quiet, forlorn, little town’ on the north-

ern bank of the Rıo de la Plata.

He was not, however,

forgotten at the meeting: a display of megatherium fossils

he had shipped to England created a minor sensation.

Newton and the Masters in Victorian Science

The founding of the British Association in 1831 marked a

watershed in the history of British science. The association

provided an annual platform for the self-appointed leaders

of science to speak collectively on the progress, future direc-

tion and social meaning of their intellectual pursuits. Brew-

ster provided the vision for the association and William

Vernon Harcourt organized the idea into reality, drawing

university men like Whewell and Sedgwick and metropoli-

tan savants like Herschel and Roderick Murchison into the

project. These gentlemen as a group supported gradual

political reform and religious toleration, a stance that

strongly colored their approach to science.

They aspired

to be, as Whewell put it, ‘moderate reformers, who appreci-

ate the value of the good which exists, though they try to

make it better, and who know the knowledge, thoughtful-

ness, and caution, which are needful in such a task’.

John Stevens Henslow,

Address delivered in the Ipswich Museum, on 9th March

1848

(Ipswich, 1848), 8, 17.

Patricia Fara,

Newton: the making of genius

(New York, 2002). Rebekah Higgitt

Recreating Newton: Newtonian biography and the making of nineteenth-century histo-

ry of science

(London, 2007). Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, method and morality: images of

Newton in Britain, 1760–1860,’

Science in Context

2 (1988): 257–84.

Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray,

Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the

British Association for the Advancement of Science

(Oxford, 1981), 17–21, 165–75.

William Hanna,

Memoirs of Thomas Chalmers,

2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1867), 2: 298.

Charles Darwin,

Voyage of the Beagle,

Janet Browne and Michael Neve (eds),

(London, 1989) 71–2.

John Stevens Henslow to Charles Darwin, 31 August 1833, in Frederick Bur-

khardt and others (eds),

The correspondence of Charles Darwin,

21 vols, (Cambridge,

1985-), 1: 327.

Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray,

Gentlemen of science: early correspondence of

the British Association for the Advancement of Science

(London, 1984), 3. Morrell and

Thackray,

Gentlemen of science: early years of the British Association,

2–34.

William Whewell,

History of the inductive sciences, from the earliest to the present

times,

3 vols. (London, 1837): 3: 454.

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Endeavour

Vol. 38 No. 3–4

Harcourt grounded the values of the association on the

legacy of Newton. ‘The chief Interpreters of nature have

always been those who grasped the widest ﬁeld of inquiry,’

he explained when expounding the object of the association

at its ﬁrst meeting. Wide ﬁelds of inquiry required break-

ing down barriers that isolated investigators and their

specialties from each other. Even Newton, he noted, need-

ed the spur of friendly support from ‘publicly-esteemed

bodies of men.’ The British Association would build net-

works not just of intellectual exchange but personal sym-

pathy, under the steady leadership of ‘masters in

science’.

Harcourt returned to this theme nine years later

in his presidential address to the association. He urged

everyone in his audience to remain a ‘disciple of the school

of Newton’ and value intellectual systems only ‘as an

expression of facts, or as a guide to future inquiry’.

The 1833 meeting in Cambridge was the pivotal mo-

ment in the association’s transition from a tentative social

experiment to an established institution capable of speak-

ing on behalf of science to the entire British nation.

Whewell reported that the assembled men lamented the

lack of any ‘general term by which [they] could describe

themselves with reference to their pursuits.’ He coined

‘scientist’ on the spot to ﬁll the need. ‘This was not gener-

ally palatable,’ he noted drily.

The scientiﬁc elite might

not yet have agreed on a common name, but a shared

reverence for Newton did provide a sense of collective

identity. This becomes clear in the attitudes and activities

of ﬁve of the most dominant personalities at the meeting:

Chalmers, Brewster, Herschel, Sedgwick and Whewell.

Chalmers treated himself to a tour of England in 1833 as

a reward for a productive stretch of difﬁcult intellectual

work, including his

Bridgewater Treatise, On the Power,

Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adap-

tation of the External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual

Constitution of Man.

In Cambridge he could hardly contain

his excitement at walking in Newton’s footsteps. William

Hanna, his son-in-law and biographer, noted that he ‘could

not mention Newton’s name without laying down some

tribute at this feet.’ For Chalmers, the humble and cau-

tious character of Newton’s genius proved that science

undisciplined by Christian morality was an empty and

contemptuous thing.

Chalmers ﬁrst established his intellectual reputation in

a series of sermons in Glasgow, published to great popu-

larity in 1817 as

A Series of Discourses on the Christian

Revelation, Viewed in Connection with Modern

Astronomy.

His discourse on ‘the modesty of true science’

argued that Newton’s greatness did not reside in his

discoveries, but in the habits of mind, a combination of

strength, modesty and piety, that made them possible.

William Vernon Harcourt, ‘Objects and plan of the association,’ in

Report of the

ﬁrst and second meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; at

York in 1831, and at Oxford in 1832

(London, 1833), 22, 28, 31, 34.

William Vernon Harcourt, ‘Presidential address,’ in

Report of the ninth meeting of

the British Association for the Advancement of Science; held at Birmingham in August

1839

(London, 1840), 4, 10.

Morrell and Thackray,

Gentlemen of science: early years of the British Association,

165. Richard Holmes,

The age of wonder

(New York, 2008), 447.

William Whewell, ‘Mrs. Somerville on the

Connexion of the Sciences,’ Quarterly

Review

51 (1834): 58–60.

Hanna,

Memoirs of Thomas Chalmers,

1: 41–2, 106.

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He expatiated on a lofty region, where, in all the

giddiness of success, he might have met with much to

solicit his fancy, and tempt him to some devious

speculation. Had he been like the majority of other

men, he would have broken free from the fetters of a

sober and chastised understanding, and, giving wing

to his imagination, had done what philosophers had

done after him – been carried away by some meteor of

their own forming, or found their amusement in some

of their own intellectual pictures, or palmed some

loose and conﬁdent plausibilities of their own upon

the world. But, Newton stood true to his principle,

that he would take up with nothing which wanted

evidence, and he kept by his demonstrations, and his

measurements, and his proofs.

He returned to this theme in his

Bridgewater Treatise,

where Newton again appeared as the embodiment of phil-

osophical self-discipline. The wonders of nature he and

other inductive investigators opened to our comprehension

have ‘a grace and grandeur in them, far above all the

visions which are contemplated through the medium of

fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest enthusiast in the

enraptured walks of speculation and poetry.’

Newton was the obvious subject when Chalmers was

called to give a short after-dinner speech in the dining hall

of Trinity College during the meeting. A few moments

earlier, John Brown, the vice-master of Trinity, had ‘with

what rapturous delight Bacon and Newton would have

been stretched forth the right hand of fellowship and

encouragement to such dutiful, and therefore successful

disciples.’ Chalmers was not outdone. ‘There was a humili-

ty of mind, the offspring of true philosophy, which mani-

fested itself in well constituted minds; and chief of all in

that of the great Sir Isaac Newton, the glory of Cambridge,

and more especially the glory of Trinity College,’ he rhap-

sodized. He concluded with the wish that Trinity would

forever be home to ‘the science of Newton consecrated by

the Christianity of Newton’. He sat down to hearty

cheers.

When he described the jubilant scene in a letter

to his wife, he noted that mention of Christianity ‘in such a

mixed company of philosophers’ might have met an icy

reception elsewhere; but in the bosom of Trinity, and

surrounded by nation’s scientiﬁc leaders, ‘my pointed allu-

sion to the sacred faith and philosophy of Newton was

received with a cordiality which nothing could exceed.’

This praise of Newton warmed Brewster’s heart. He

ﬁnished writing his biography of Newton (Figure

a few

months before the ﬁrst meeting of the British Association

in 1831. This account of Newton’s life radiates veneration

from its opening line: ‘The name of Sir Isaac Newton has by

general consent been placed at the head of those great men

who have been the ornaments of their species.’ The book

Thomas Chalmers,

A series of discourses on the Christian revelation, viewed in

connection with modern astronomy,

2nd ed. (Glasgow, 1817), 66–7.

Thomas Chalmers,

On the power, wisdom and goodness of God as manifested in

the adaptation of the external nature to the moral and intellectual constitution of man

(London, 1833), 2: 189–94.

Lithographed signatures of the members of the British Association for the Advance-

ment of Science, who met at Cambridge, June

DCC

XIII

, with a report of the proceedings

of the public meetings during the week

(Cambridge, 1833), 102, 107–8.

Hanna,

Memoirs of Thomas Chalmers,

2: 297–300.

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