SOURCE: "Isaac Newton (1642-1727)," in Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, Humanities Press, 1995, pp. 3-31.

In the following excerpt, Dobbs and Jacob survey Newton's life and works, highlighting Newton's primary beliefs, influences, and discoveries up to his writing of the Principia.

Gi; newton's Youth =~ Snewton's Youth

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, the premature, posthumous, and only child of an illiterate yeoman farmer of Lincolnshire in England. Not really expected at first to live—he was later to remark that at his birth he was so small that he might have been put into a quart mug—he survived war, revolution, plague, and the seventeenth-century pharmacopoeia to the age of 84, to be buried in Westminster Abbey (the traditional place of interment for the queens and kings of England), idolized by many of his countrymen and admired by much of the Western world.

His genius appeared more mechanical...