An essay concerning the late apparition in the heavens on the 6th of March. Proving by mathematical, logical, and moral arguments, that it cou'd not have been produced meerly by the ordinary course of nature, but must of necessity be a prodigy. Humbly offered to the consideration of the Royal Society. London, 1716, 8vo.
The prodigy, as described, was what we should call a very decided and unusual aurora borealis. The inference was, that men's sins were bringing on the end of the world. The author thinks that if one of the old "threatening prophets" were then alive, he would give "something like the following." I quote a few sentences of the notion which the author had of the way in which Ezekiel, for instance, would have addressed his Maker in the reign of George the First:
"Begin! Begin! O Sovereign, for once, with an {135} effectual clap of thunder.... O Deity! either thunder to us no more, or when you thunder, do it home, and strike with vengeance to the mark.... 'Tis not enough to raise a storm, unless you follow it with a blow, and the thunder without the bolt, signifies just nothing at all.... Are then your lightnings of so short a sight, that they don't know how to hit, unless a mountain stands like a barrier in their way? Or perhaps so many eyes open in the firmament make you lose your aim when you shoot the arrow? Is it this? No! but, my dear Lord, it is your custom never to take hold of your arms till you have first bound round your majestic countenance with gathered mists and clouds."
The principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces ... By Robert Greene,[279] M.A., Fellow of Clare Hall. Cambridge, 1727, folio.
Sanderson[280] writes to Jones,[281] "The gentleman has been reputed mad for these two years last past, but never gave the world such ample testimony of it before." This was said of a former work of Greene's, on solid geometry, published in 1712, in which he gives a quadrature.[282] He gives the same or another, I do not know which, in the present work, in which the circle is 3-1/5 diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at all mad, only wrong on {136} many points. It is the weakness of the orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene. If misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, be sufficient evidence of madness, it would be a curious inquiry what is the least per-centage of the reigning school which has been insane at any one time. Greene is one of the sources for Newton being led to think of gravitation by the fall of an apple: his authority is the gossip of Martin Folkes.[283] Probably Folkes had it from Newton's niece, Mrs. Conduitt, whom Voltaire acknowledges as _his authority_.[284] It is in the draft found among Conduitt's papers of memoranda to be sent to Fontenelle. But Fontenelle, though a great retailer of anecdote, does not mention it in his _eloge_ of Newton; whence it may be suspected that it was left out in the copy forwarded to France. D'Israeli has got an improvement on the story: the apple "struck him a smart blow on the head": no doubt taking him just on the organ of causality. He was "surprised at the force of the stroke" from so small an apple: but then the apple had a mission; Homer would have said {137} it was Minerva in the form of an apple. "This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies," which Galileo had settled long before: "from whence he deduced the principle of gravity," which many had considered before him, but no one had _deduced anything from it_. I cannot imagine whence D'Israeli got the rap on the head, I mean got it for Newton: this is very unlike his usual accounts of things. The story is pleasant and possible: its only defect is that various writings, well known to Newton, a very _learned_ mathematician, had given more suggestion than a whole sack of apples could have done, if they had tumbled on that mighty head all at once. And Pemberton, speaking from Newton himself, says nothing more than that the idea of the moon being retained by the same force which causes the fall of bodies struck him for the first time while meditating in a garden. One particular tree at Woolsthorpe has been selected as the gallows of the appleshaped goddess: it died in 1820, and Mr. Turnor[285] kept the wood; but Sir D. Brewster[286] brought away a bit of root in 1814, and must have had it on his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree. Kepler's suggestion of gravitation with the inverse distance, and Bouillaud's proposed substitution of the inverse square of the distance, are things which Newton knew better than his modern readers. I discovered two anagrams on his name, which are quite conclusive; the notion of gravitation was _not new_; but Newton _went on_. Some wandering spirit, probably whose business it was to resent any liberty taken with Newton's name, put into the head of a friend of mine _eighty-one_ anagrams on my own pair, some of which hit harder than any apple.
{138}
