Note 189 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

That Sir Isaac Newton was “some kind of Unitarian”189 is proved by documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in the second edition of Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs. There is indeed no question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts as such,190 and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel and the Apocalypse.191 Temperamentally, also, he was averse to anything like bold discussion, declaring that “those at Cambridge ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience”192—this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James II. In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius, does he appear as morally193 or intellectually pre-eminent; and even on the side of science he was limited by his theological presuppositions, as when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing to Bentley that “the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd.”194 There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of his pious biographer that “the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath the implied rebuke”195 of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown by Newton and his friends196 to checkmate “the infidels” is a proof that his religious work was not scientific even in inception, but the expression of his neurotic side; and the attempt of some of his scientific admirers to show that his religious researches belong solely to the years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his day that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, he drew away from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show himself a destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of Athanasius197: he expressly formulates the propositions (1) that “there is one God the Father ... and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”; (2) that “the Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible”; and (3) that “the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself.”198 Such opinions, of course, could not be published: under the Act of 1697 they would have made Newton liable to loss of office and all civil rights. In his own day, therefore, his opinions were rather gossipped-of than known;199 but insofar as his heresy was realized, it must have wrought much more for unbelief than could be achieved for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace strictures on atheism, which show the ordinary inability to see what atheism means.