Various Biographies On Learned Men

Originally Written 12/10/2024

Trajano Boccalini, Lapis Lydius politicus, Amsterodami, apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1640.

Thomas Carlyle

The Temperamental Sage

Prelude

Among the reactionary canon, few figures are as elusive and difficult to categorize as Thomas Carlyle. Part theologian, part scholar, part journalist, and part man of society, Carlyle stands as a paradox: famous for his acerbic temper, yet equally renowned for his wit and humor. A celebrated man of his era, Carlyle remained an outsider, never fully integrated into the intellectual cliques of his time. Tireless in his work, uncompromising in his critiques, he left behind writings that continue to perplex and challenge scholars with their incisive, often troubling observations on humanity and history.

The Young Man's Journey Begins

On a day likely as cold and unyielding as the rugged Scottish countryside that surrounded it, Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4, 1795, in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway. His father, James Carlyle, was a skilled stonemason whose success in his trade allowed him to provide Thomas with a solid education, spanning from childhood to early adulthood. His mother, Margaret Carlyle, remains a shadowy figure in history, with little written about her beyond what can be gleaned from her son's reverent memories.

Carlyle's early schooling began at Annan Academy, where he endured relentless bullying, leading him to leave after three years. This period of his life remains sparsely documented, with few firsthand accounts. Biographers, writing decades later during the Victorian era, have reconstructed a narrative from fragments and anecdotes. What emerges most clearly is the profound influence of his Calvinist upbringing. From his father, Carlyle inherited an unwavering belief in the sanctity of hard work—a principle he would champion throughout his life. Perhaps no other writer has so passionately defended the Protestant work ethic.

Both of Carlyle's parents aspired for him to enter the clergy, a common ambition for families of modest means. To this end, they sent him to the University of Edinburgh in 1810 at the tender age of 15. The move was transformative. Edinburgh, then the beating heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, was alive with intellectual fervor. For over two centuries, the city had been a hub of learning, fueled by the wealth of merchants and landowners, and inspired by the achievements of figures like David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Boswell.

Carlyle arrived in a city that had already reshaped the intellectual landscape of Europe. Hume’s empiricism had revolutionized philosophy, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations had birthed modern economics, and Macpherson’s Ossian poems had ignited the Romantic movement, captivating Goethe himself—a figure who would later deeply influence Carlyle. Edinburgh also boasted advancements in mathematics and linguistics, led by scholars such as Lord Monboddo and John Leslie. For a young man from a rural village, the city offered an overwhelming wealth of ideas and opportunities.

Despite his immersion in divinity studies, Carlyle's interests began to shift. He was drawn increasingly to mathematics and later to German literature, a passion that would shape his career. Though he completed his degree in divinity three years later, he had by then lost his Christian faith. Carlyle did not become an atheist; rather, he evolved into a skeptic, unable to commit to any established system of worship. He retained the moral rigor and ethical framework of Calvinism but became, perhaps, a deist in the style of Enlightenment thinkers like Monboddo. During this period, he formed a lifelong friendship with Edward Irving, founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, through whom he would later meet his wife.

Despite veering from the clergy, Carlyle maintained an enduring admiration for his parents, particularly their ethical grounding and industrious spirit. He considered himself a rural man at heart, who, like his father, had elevated his status through relentless effort. This respect for hard work and humble beginnings would later manifest in his personal charity: Carlyle often sheltered or supported the destitute in London, moved by appeals to his sense of justice and empathy. His mother, in particular, held a sacred place in his memory, and her influence would haunt the emotional coda of his life.

After completing his studies, Carlyle returned to Annan Academy—not as a student, but as a mathematics teacher. He later taught at a grammar school in Kirkcaldy, where he demonstrated his intellectual prowess by solving a mathematical problem posed by the physicist John Leslie. To this day, the Carlyle Circle—a solution to certain quadratic problems—bears his name. However, mathematics soon gave way to a new passion: German literature. He learned the language with remarkable speed and became deeply engrossed in the works of Schiller, Goethe, and others.

In 1823 and 1824, Carlyle serialized a biography of Friedrich Schiller in the London Magazine. This marked the beginning of his career as a writer. His expertise in German literature became widely recognized, and he published translations that introduced Scottish and English audiences to German Romanticism. By 1824, Carlyle had emerged as Scotland's foremost authority on German letters, and arguably England’s as well. His essays and translations found a ready audience among Scotland’s vibrant network of intellectual periodicals, which were disseminated via subscription posts that connected even the most remote parts of the country.

Carlyle’s growing literary reputation coincided with a profound spiritual transformation. He experienced what he later described as a clearing away of doubts about the universe’s benevolent design. This “semi-mystical” revelation convinced him that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the “Everlasting No”—his term for the spirit of unbelief. It was a rejection of nihilism and despair, a leap of faith that prefigured Kierkegaard’s own explorations of doubt and conviction.

By this time, Carlyle had committed fully to the life of a writer. He earned a modest living contributing essays and articles to magazines, often defending conservative and anti-reformist positions. Though his work aligned him with the Tory intelligentsia, he was never a blind partisan. His admiration for German idealism and Romanticism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, and his writings would soon take on a singular voice that defied easy categorization.

Thus, the Carlyle we know today began to emerge: a man of deep intellect and profound contradictions, whose works continue to provoke admiration and debate. His early years, marked by hardship and relentless self-discipline, had prepared him for a life of enduring influence. From the Calvinist ethics of his upbringing to the Romantic ideals he would later champion, Carlyle’s journey was one of ceaseless inquiry and uncompromising conviction.

A Tale For Two

Jane Baillie Welsh was born in Haddington, Scotland, in July of 1801. By the standards of her time—and even by those of the present—she was remarkably well-educated. Known for her voracious reading, she had already written a novel by the age of thirteen and completed a five-act drama not long after. Her intellect and literary inclinations brought her into contact with Edward Irving, a prominent theologian and one of her tutors. It was through Irving that she first encountered Thomas Carlyle. Their initial meetings in 1821 were far from remarkable; Jane found Carlyle brooding and awkward. She even doubted his intellectual worth. When Carlyle attempted to be personable or romantic, his rural origins betrayed him, and he appeared every bit the “awkward country boy” he sought to transcend.

Jane, by contrast, was slender, elegant, and cosmopolitan despite her provincial roots. A noted beauty with delicate features, she was also fiery and assertive, her Scotch temper leading her to resolve disputes with an energy that could border on violence. Carlyle, captivated by her forceful intellect, quickly fell in love. Their courtship, shrouded in mystery, was marked by Jane’s mother’s skepticism. Mrs. Welsh believed Carlyle to be her daughter’s inferior in both social standing and intellect. Nevertheless, the two married in 1826. Jane was 25, Carlyle 31.

Though Jane Carlyle published nothing during her lifetime, she left behind a treasure trove of letters and diaries, many of which have been posthumously published with commentary. Her writings reveal a literary talent that rivaled her husband’s. Why she chose not to publish remains unclear, but her influence on Carlyle’s work and her sharp, witty correspondence with friends and intellectuals attest to her remarkable skill.

The couple began their married life at Craigenputtock, Jane’s modest agricultural estate. Carlyle found the seclusion conducive to his work, famously writing, “It is certain that, for living and thinking in, I have never since found in the world a place so favorable.” At Craigenputtock, Carlyle composed some of his most celebrated essays, including his famous piece on Dr. Francia, the dictator of Paraguay. Most notably, it was here that he wrote Sartor Resartus (Latin for The Tailor Retailored), the novel that established his fame.

Sartor Resartus exemplifies Carlyle’s unique blend of humor and philosophy. It is, in part, a satire of German idealism and academic pretension, but it also contains profound reflections on spirituality and the human condition. The work adopts a Fichtean perspective on religious conversion, depicting it as an explicit rejection of evil by the free soul. Despite its philosophical density, the novel enjoyed success both in Britain and abroad. It resonated deeply with American intellectuals like Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, who saw in it a precursor to existentialism and even glimmers of postmodernism and magical realism.

Carlyle’s reflections on the intellectual and mechanical efforts of human progress are particularly striking. He wrote:

"He who first shortened the labour of copyists by devising movable types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing."

Walt Whitman later remarked that without Carlyle and Sartor Resartus, British letters of the 19th century would have been “like an army with no artillery.” Indeed, the novel was a literary cannonade fired from quiet Craigenputtock into the bustling heart of literary London.

By 1837, the Carlyles moved to Chelsea, where they would reside for the rest of their lives. London offered intellectual opportunities, and Carlyle quickly befriended luminaries like essayist Leigh Hunt and philosopher John Stuart Mill. Yet the city was ill-suited to Carlyle’s temperament. Suffering from chronic digestive ailments that caused him constant pain, Carlyle found the urban environment intolerable. The cacophony of street vendors, organ grinders, preachers, and traffic grated on his nerves, disrupting his meditative nature. In an effort to escape the noise, he spent a fortune soundproofing the highest room of their house, only to discover that the modifications amplified the din rather than silencing it.

Compounding Carlyle’s urban misery was the growing tension in his marriage. Jane’s diaries reveal her candid admission that she had married Carlyle without ever truly loving him; her heart had belonged to Edward Irving. Their relationship was marked by frequent and bitter quarrels over seemingly trivial matters. Yet, unlike the tumultuous marriages of contemporaries like Dickens or Ruskin, the Carlyles never separated. They remained committed, if unhappily so.

Jane’s frustrations often spilled over into her treatment of household staff. Over two decades, she hired and dismissed 37 maids, clashing with them over her tendency to demonstrate “how real work was done.” Despite her intellectual gifts, Jane found satisfaction in the physical labor of housework, though it added to the chaos of their domestic life.

Both Carlyles formed close relationships outside their marriage, fueling further discord. Jane became enamored with the exiled Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, which left Carlyle seething with jealousy. Meanwhile, Carlyle struck up an affectionate friendship with Lady Harriet Montague, a glamorous socialite. Though Carlyle likely never harbored physical desires for Lady Montague, Jane viewed her as a threat and chastised her husband mercilessly for spending time in the baroness’s company.

Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of their union was its probable lack of physical intimacy. Biographers have speculated that Carlyle may have been impotent, but more likely, the couple simply derived no pleasure from each other in that regard. Despite this, they maintained an intimate domestic arrangement, living and sleeping together until Jane’s death. Samuel Butler’s quip about their marriage encapsulates its dynamic:
"It was very good of God to let Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle marry so as to make two people miserable instead of four."

The Sage of Chelsea

In 1837, Thomas Carlyle made his definitive step into the London intelligentsia with the undertaking of his monumental three-volume work, The French Revolution: A History. Famously, the story goes that as his friend J.S. Mill reviewed the draft of the first volume, Mill's illiterate maid mistook it for scrap paper and cast it into the fire. Mill, distraught and pale as a sheet, arrived at Carlyle's door to deliver the tragic news. Carlyle accepted the calamity with stoic composure, declining Mill’s offer of £100 as compensation.

One might question the plausibility of this tale. Mill’s household, bustling with literary activity, would likely have been strewn with manuscripts. Even an illiterate maid might distinguish a bound draft from mere scraps. Yet, as history has passed it down, the narrative endures. Undaunted, Carlyle rewrote the first volume largely from memory, completing it alongside the second and third volumes.

The work was an extraordinary success, characterized by a fervent pace and a style far removed from the analytical narratives of his contemporaries. Carlyle's prose carried a novelistic intensity, capturing the admiration of Charles Dickens, who modeled A Tale of Two Cities in part on Carlyle’s history. Dickens reportedly carried the entire three-volume set wherever he went, quoting it often.

Carlyle followed this success with On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Originally delivered as lectures, this work launched the "Great Man" theory of history. Carlyle examined a pantheon of figures—religious, artistic, and political—asserting that history is shaped by heroic individuals. Yet, he acknowledged the flawed humanity of such figures, deriding critics for what he termed “valetism,” the reduction of great men to their mundane qualities, as if viewing them through the eyes of a servant performing menial tasks.

Subsequently, Carlyle distanced himself from the reformist tide with Past and Present. Here, he attacked the moral condition of industrial England, arguing that genuine liberation lay in labor. England, though prosperous, was riddled with poverty and idleness. Carlyle idealized the medieval monastic tradition, which offered both spiritual and material aid to society’s unfortunates—a sentiment later echoed in the writings of G.K. Chesterton.

Carlyle’s views became more controversial following the 1865 Jamaican uprising, where Governor John Eyre suppressed unrest with harsh measures, executing revolutionary leaders and imposing martial law. This event divided British intellectuals. Mill's Jamaica Committee sought to prosecute Eyre, while Carlyle joined the Eyre Defence Committee, supported by figures such as Lord Tennyson and Charles Dickens. Carlyle’s alignment with the conservative faction alienated many former allies, including Mill.

It was during this period that Carlyle penned Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, a polemic that stirred considerable outrage. His fictional narrator argued that the emancipated West Indian population, unprepared for freedom, languished in idleness. While Carlyle did not advocate for a return to chattel slavery, he contended that productive labor was preferable to squalid inertia.

By the late 1860s, Carlyle’s disdain for reformers extended to Britain’s political landscape. He decried universal suffrage, likening it to placing a ship’s command at the mercy of the crew. His trenchant critiques isolated him from polite society, even as his fame and financial success grew.

Amid this storm, Carlyle embarked on his most ambitious project, a biography of Frederick the Great. The task consumed thirteen years, involving meticulous research across German battlefields and archives. Carlyle sought to portray Frederick as a heroic force imposing order upon chaos, embodying a spiritual resistance to the Enlightenment’s liberalism.

The Life of Frederick the Great stretched to six volumes, but the effort exacted a heavy toll. Carlyle endured marital strife, debilitating physical ailments, and mixed critical reception. The "Sage of Chelsea," beleaguered and worn, came to regard the work as his "thirteen years’ war" with Frederick, seldom speaking of it. Yet, through it all, Carlyle’s prose and vision remained a testament to his enduring belief in the power of heroism to shape history.

The Later Years of Carlyle

Carlyle’s life grew increasingly arduous in his later years. His fame brought recognition, including a nomination as the Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. At the inaugural ceremony, he seized the moment to admonish the students on the virtues of hard work. Just three weeks later, Jane, his wife, passed away after a long illness. Despite the fractious and often cold nature of their marriage, Carlyle was devastated by her death. Stricken with grief, he discovered her letters and diaries, which led him to pen a deeply self-critical memoir of their life together. In it, he lamented his poor treatment of her and wished fervently for the chance to beg her forgiveness. This memoir was published posthumously by J.A. Froude, Carlyle’s biographer.

His final years were spent yearning for a return to his family estate at Craigenputtock, though he would never leave London again. By 1874, Carlyle was celebrated as Britain’s preeminent man of letters. Queen Victoria and her prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, proposed awarding him the Order of the Bath along with a pension, partly to address the imbalance of honors favoring scientists over literary figures. Disraeli’s support startled many, including Carlyle himself, who confided to John Ruskin:

“Disraeli—a conscious juggler, a superlative Hebrew conjurer! He is the one man I never spoke of except with contempt, and yet here he comes with a pan of hot coals for my guilty head.”

Though Carlyle declined the honor, his official response was gracious:

“Titles of honor are out of keeping with the tenor of my poor life. As for money, after years of rigorous and frugal—though never degrading—poverty, it has become abundant, even superabundant. Nevertheless, the proposal is magnanimous and noble, without example in the history of governing persons with men of letters.”

Despite his gratitude, Carlyle later remarked bitterly on Disraeli’s final ministry, calling him “a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon.”

Late in life, Carlyle sat for Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2 by American artist James McNeill Whistler. He admired Whistler’s earlier work, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, for its austere simplicity and profile composition. Carlyle sat for Whistler from late 1872 through the summer of 1873, his melancholy deepening throughout the process. Witnesses, including artist Hugh Cameron, noted the contrast between Carlyle’s motionless, sage-like demeanor and Whistler’s frenetic energy. Carlyle later wrote:

“More and more dreary, barren, base, and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor diminishing quack world.”

As a staunch reactionary, Carlyle grew ever more despondent, seeing the triumph of the democratic forces he had long opposed.

Thomas Carlyle passed away on February 5, 1881. Though offered burial in Westminster Abbey, he chose instead to rest alongside his parents in the remote solitude of Ecclefechan. His reported final words, whispered weakly, were: “My mother.” Only a year later, J.A. Froude’s authorized biography appeared, revealing intimate details of Carlyle’s troubled marriage. These revelations, shocking to late Victorian society, illustrated the hidden struggles of ostensibly devout and respectable unions.

Carlyle stands as a towering figure, chronicling and critiquing the peaks and troughs of the 19th century. From the Regency Romantics to the late Victorian Realists, he bore witness to an era of immense change. Though often ignored in his own time, his work has been read and analyzed ever since—a distinction few reactionary writers achieve. Carlyle influenced both the left and the right, his prose marked by incisive wit and indelible substance.

To the modern reader, Carlyle’s works remain invaluable. His style will captivate; his probity and wit will challenge. You will laugh, yet find yourself unsettled, your beliefs affirmed and yet shaken. To paraphrase the man himself: “In books lies the soul of the whole past time—the articulate, audible voice of the past—when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.” Seek his works, not on a screen, but on the printed page. There, Carlyle endures.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

A Brief Biography

The Thirty Years’ War ravaged the Holy Roman Empire, beginning as a localized struggle and erupting into a catastrophic conflict among Europe’s great powers. Germany suffered grievously, losing a quarter of its population, with regions like Brandenburg seeing nearly half their people succumb to plague and bloodshed. Amid this shattered world, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig on July 1, 1646, two years before the Peace of Westphalia sought to bring order to the chaos.

One early biographer exalted Leibniz: “Antiquity made one Hercules from many; we shall make many savants from one Leibniz.” Since 1923, scholars have compiled his immense body of work into over twenty volumes, with completion anticipated to take centuries. Leibniz excelled as diplomat, jurist, mathematician, philosopher, geologist, engineer, linguist, computational pioneer, inventor, logician, and theologian, often pursuing these endeavors simultaneously. His prodigious output supports his lament of occasionally spending days recording the thoughts of a single morning.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica portrays him vividly: “A man of medium height with a stoop, broad-shouldered but bandy-legged, as capable of pondering for days in one chair as of traversing Europe in all seasons. He was an indefatigable worker, a universal letter writer with over 600 correspondents, a patriot and a cosmopolitan, a great scientist, and one of the most powerful spirits of Western civilization.”

Yet not all are so effusive. Historian George Ross critiques Leibniz: “It is ironic that one so committed to mutual understanding contributed to intellectual chauvinism and dogmatism.” Ross underscores the paradox of Leibniz as the last true polymath—not merely a generalist but one who roamed freely across all intellectual domains. Leibniz’s disdain for universities stemmed from their compartmentalized structure, which stifled the cross-pollination of ideas he deemed vital. Yet, ironically, his own work heralded the rise of specialization, as advancing disciplines outpaced the grasp of laymen and amateurs alike.

Leibniz exemplified an unyielding belief in the unity of knowledge. He wrote: “What Hippocrates said of the human body applies to the universe: all things conspire and are sympathetic; nothing happens in one creature without some corresponding effect upon all others.”

Leibniz’s religious and philosophical stances remain contentious. Critics have variously labeled him Catholic, Lutheran, Kabbalist, Rosicrucian, atheist, or Deist. Bertrand Russell believed he espoused two philosophies: a public one steeped in Christianity, which Russell loathed, and a private one grounded in logic.

Born to Friedrich Leibniz, a twice-widowed professor of moral philosophy, Gottfried was the first son of Friedrich’s third wife. Friedrich, industrious and virtuous, predicted greatness in his son, interpreting Gottfried’s childhood mishaps as signs of divine favor. When Friedrich died, six-year-old Gottfried inherited a library that proved a lifelong treasure.

As Maria Antognazza observes, Leibniz’s early habit of exploring diverse fields set the pace for his life. Though initially baffled by the books, often in Greek or Latin, he absorbed their ideas with growing clarity. At seven, he enrolled in the Nikolaischule, an elite institution tied closely to Leipzig University. Its curriculum focused on the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—devoting twenty hours weekly to Latin but scant attention to arithmetic. The rigorous training paid off: as a youth, Leibniz once composed 300 Latin verses in a morning.

Leipzig, though no intellectual capital, boasted a thriving book trade. Disregarding admonitions against “unseasonable” reading, young Leibniz freely roamed his father’s library, devouring Livy’s History of Rome among other texts. By thirteen, he had discovered Aristotelian logic, only to question its validity with remarkable independence for his age.

In 1661, at fourteen, Leibniz entered Leipzig University. There he encountered thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo. Completing his bachelor’s degree in nineteen months, he wrote his dissertation on individuation—how to distinguish items within a group—six months later.

Despite his scholastic achievements, Leibniz’s horizons extended beyond academia. He joined the Collegium Conferentium, a society dedicated to dissecting intellectual traditions, and served as its treasurer. After graduating, he inherited modest means and began composing judicial treatises while drafting his Art of Combinations. Inspired by Descartes and Ramon Llull, Leibniz sought a universal alphabet of thought—an elemental calculus capable of resolving disputes and revealing truths from first principles.

This ambition reflected the influence of Scholastics like William of Ockham and contemporaries like Hobbes, who also sought to escape the ambiguities of natural language. As Antognazza suggests, Leibniz’s vision resembled reducing numbers to primes: a quest for simplicity that promised infinite potential. In such dreams, Leibniz set the foundation for his enduring legacy.

“But to return to the expression of thought through symbols, I hold this conviction: the end of disputes and the silencing of sects can scarcely be achieved unless intricate arguments are reduced to plain calculations, and ambiguous terms are replaced by precise symbols. Once this transformation is accomplished, philosophers need not engage in endless debates any more than accountants quarrel over sums. It will suffice to take up pen and abacus, and, with a friend if desired, declare: ‘Let us calculate.’”

Denied a teaching post at Leipzig due to his youth, Leibniz submitted his thesis to Altdorf and swiftly earned his doctorate. His Latin oration at graduation, delivered with extemporaneous eloquence, astonished his audience, who marveled at his command of the language of Cicero. Amused by their awe, Leibniz reveled in his fluency. Soon after, he became secretary to a Nuremberg alchemical society, securing the role with an application replete with jargon he later confessed he barely understood. His florid letter persuaded the members he was already an adept. Initially hopeful in discovering the philosopher’s stone in phosphorus, he later dismissed alchemy entirely, finding greater intrigue in shaping the policies of states.

With the mentorship of Johann Christian von Boineburg, Leibniz entered the service of the Archbishop of Mainz, a powerful prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He began advocating for public health, envisioning its significance in advancing human welfare. Presciently, he proclaimed:

“Moral and medical matters should be our chief concern. I value microscopy above telescopy; and if one were to discover a reliable cure for any disease, it would surpass the discovery of the quadrature of the circle in merit.”

In another essay, he foresaw the vital role of government in promoting medical collaboration and controlling epidemics, stating:

“Human life is sacred and must never be commodified.”

In 1672, Leibniz traveled to Paris, seeking to persuade the French king to launch a crusade against Egypt. This sojourn marked a shift; he set aside law, literature, and theological debates to immerse himself in mathematics. Under the tutelage of the cautious and meticulous Christiaan Huygens, Leibniz, ever the visionary, conceived the infinitesimal calculus by the end of his stay. Oldenburg of the Royal Society facilitated an encounter between Leibniz and Samuel Morland, where their calculating machines were compared. Leibniz’s device, capable of multiplication and division alongside addition and subtraction, improved upon predecessors but faced skepticism from figures like Robert Hooke. Nevertheless, the Royal Society welcomed him at age twenty-six.

In England, he met luminaries such as Robert Boyle and John Pell. An embarrassing episode arose when Pell pointed out that one of Leibniz’s mathematical assertions had already been discovered by Lyon’s Mouton. Hastily verifying Pell’s claim, Leibniz bore the humiliation but emerged wiser, resolving to announce discoveries more cautiously. This prudence marked a pivotal lesson in his intellectual maturation.

Returning to Paris, he tutored Phillip Wilhelm von Boineburg while navigating financial strain—a formative period that likely spurred his lifelong strategy of securing multiple patrons. Leibniz, ever optimistic, declared: “He who has less must work more; the more he works, the greater his achievements.”

During this period, John Collins sent him a summary of British mathematical advances, mentioning Isaac Newton’s work on “the quadrature of all curvilinear figures.” The report was too vague to influence Leibniz significantly, though it fueled the controversies that later ensnared both men. Bertrand Russell aptly summarized the ensuing disputes as “discreditable to all parties.”

In 1675, Leibniz formulated integral calculus and introduced enduring notations like the integral sign (∫) and the d for differentials. On his return to Germany in 1676, he visited van Leeuwenhoek and Spinoza in Holland before arriving in Hanover. There, he found a kindred spirit in Duke Johann Friedrich and proposed sweeping reforms: legal restructuring, public education, health care, poverty alleviation, labor laws, a luxury tax, and an embryonic social security system. As royal librarian, he devised one of the earliest cataloging systems, laying the groundwork for future libraries.

In 1679, Leibniz penned The Most Christian War-God, a satirical critique of Louis XIV, accusing him of cloaking ambition with religious piety:

“Many men prioritize personal interest over public good, immediate gain over future benefit. They see the Church’s salvation tied to France’s dominance yet prioritize their princes over Christendom. Their indiscreet zeal for liberty blinds them to France’s role in preserving freedom from Ottoman conquest.”

In a letter to Huygens, Leibniz envisioned a symbolic representation of geometrical concepts akin to algebra for numbers, aspiring to describe figures and motions with symbols rather than diagrams. His ideas anticipated aspects of topology and fractal geometry, though his exact influence on these fields remains debated.

Around this time, he explored binary arithmetic, foreseeing its vast potential centuries ahead of its full realization. His work in determinants—now associated with Cramer’s Rule—offered practical solutions to linear equations but went unpublished. Ever ahead of his time, Leibniz continued to weave threads of diverse disciplines into a tapestry of universal understanding.

In his physics, he proposed, in opposition to Newton, a relativistic interpretation of space.

"If motion is nothing but the change of contact or immediate vicinity, it follows that we can never define which object is moved. For just as the same phenomena may be explained by different hypotheses in astronomy, so one can always attribute real motion to either of the two bodies that change their mutual vicinity or position."

He elaborated further in another essay:

"No eye, wherever in matter it might be placed, has a sure criterion for discerning from phenomena where there is motion, how much motion exists, or what its nature is. Nor can it ascertain whether God moves everything around it or moves the eye itself."

Between 1670 and 1690, Leibniz contributed to propositional and modal logic while developing his universal calculus. Like much of his finest work, these contributions were published posthumously. His early focus was the axiomatization of syllogisms, a system that simplified proving or disproving logical statements. His “linear diagrams,” later called "Euler-circles," analyzed statements like "some men are wise" and "no man is a stone."

His work in modal logic emerged partially from his metaphysical writings, anticipating what is now called “possible-world semantics.” This analytical approach deals with true, false, possible, contingent, and necessary statements. His metaphysics relied heavily on such tools, including the much-mocked notion that this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire famously ridiculed this idea through Professor Pangloss in Candide, a caricature of Leibniz's optimism.

During this period, a seemingly prosaic task consumed much of his energy: draining the Harz mountains’ ducal mines, a critical source of income for the Guelf dynasty. While silver production had declined since the Thirty Years' War, Leibniz, far from despairing, saw the challenge as a way to serve his patron and apply his mechanical ingenuity. Miners had long employed hydraulic pumps powered by mountain streams, but these faltered during dry years. Ever ambitious, Leibniz sought not just to maintain but to improve the process, devising solutions for entangling chains and proposing a conical spiral winding drum. His designs for endless cables endure today, though practical limitations of his era thwarted their implementation.

The narrative often portrays Leibniz as unappreciated by mining officials, with his wind-powered drainage plans failing due to lack of support. However, cost overruns of sevenfold by 1683 fueled frustration among patrons and officials alike. His demeanor, tinged with condescension, did not help matters. When a reviewer suggested others evaluate his plans, he retorted, “Experience is, in my opinion, a better judge than those gentlemen.”

Leibniz was no dilettante. Beyond his calculating machine, he invented mechanisms for watches, an aneroid barometer, a submarine, and even a spacecraft—though he abandoned the latter due to the thinness of air at high altitudes. His binary arithmetic inspired a conceptual machine controlled by marbles representing 1s and 0s, effectively designing a primitive computer.

Around this time, the Guelf family tasked him with writing a 2,000-year history. To trace their lineage to the Este family, he traveled to Italy. Though in his forties, his insatiable curiosity remained undiminished. Italian scholars warmly welcomed him, making his stay both productive and pleasant. He returned to Germany in November.

Leibniz had peculiar habits. At weddings, he offered brides “useful maxims” rather than costly gifts. He never married, showing no evident interest in sex, men, or women, though he maintained close friendships with several women.

"All my difficulties arise from being outside a great city like Paris or London, where one finds many learned men to provide instruction and assistance. Here, one finds hardly anyone to converse with. Indeed, one is not seen as a proper courtier if one speaks of learned matters, and without the Duchess, such topics would be discussed even less."

His philosophical ideas extended to psychology. Believing nature existed on a continuum, he proposed stages of consciousness leading to deep sleep and rejected Cartesian dualism for psychophysical parallelism. In this view, the brain and body act independently yet harmoniously. He also posited that many perceptions lie below conscious awareness, laying groundwork for concepts of the unconscious. His ideas influenced William Wundt, who pioneered the scientific study of perception, and Ernst Platner, who coined the term Unconscious.

In 1690, Leibniz wrote to Christian Huygens:

"Had I the age and leisure I enjoyed in Paris, I might hope to achieve in physics the progress your earlier guidance helped me make in geometry. But my mental vigor is much diminished, and I am distracted by studies demanding my full attention. Occasionally, I escape the prison of my duties. My recent journey to Italy cheered me, but now I must return more than ever to my daily obligations, including a vast historical work heavy with facts, demanding the utmost precision."

Leibniz was in the throes of a midlife crisis. Hypochondria gripped him; he feared death would forestall the completion of his proliferating projects. To a friend, he confessed:

"If death grants me the time to finish my conceived projects, I vow not to embark on new ones and to labor diligently on those already begun. Yet even with such a bargain, I fear I will still be tardy. Death, alas, is indifferent to our plans or the advancement of science."

Despite these anxieties, his ambitions continued unabated. His Guelf History began not with the dynasty’s inception, nor the Holy Roman Empire, nor even Alexander’s conquest at Gaugamela. Instead, it sought the origins of the earth itself. This inquiry led to geological studies in Lower Saxony and reflections on humanity’s arrival in the region. Such inquiries yielded insights centuries ahead of their time: Leibniz posited that the earth began as a molten sphere, cooling over eons to form a crust, beneath which a liquid core persisted. Volcanic eruptions bore this truth. Rejecting literal interpretations of Scripture, he proposed not one Great Flood but many lesser deluges over millennia.

His restless mind turned again to public health, a cause close to his heart. He envisioned councils of experts convened to address pressing matters and advocated the meticulous recording of diseases and epidemics for improved treatment. With Ramazzini’s collaboration, he sought to formalize medical statistics and make annual health reports a legal requirement.

In Sophia of Hanover, Leibniz found a patroness and ally. The electress, later queen of Prussia, valued his counsel. To Frederick I, he suggested taxing tobacco, recognizing its addictive harm. Yet the final years of his life in Hanover were marked by struggle. He was pressed to complete the long-delayed Guelf History while financial support from the Berlin Academy waned. Ill health, mounting obligations, and dwindling resources dogged him. Yet even in decline, he labored for reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics, seeking lasting peace in Europe. His theology, distilled to its essence, declared: “Salvation is possible in every religion, provided one truly loves God above all else.”

His intellectual duel with Newton and the Newtonians persisted. His correspondence with Samuel Clarke, Newton’s disciple, spanned metaphysics, theology, and natural philosophy. Newton, fervently religious, aligned with Augustine, emphasizing the will and power of God as the source of creation. For Newton, God’s active intervention governed the cosmos. Leibniz, following Aquinas, saw God’s wisdom and foresight embedded in the universe’s design. An intervening deity, he argued, implied imperfection in the divine plan.

Their views on matter clashed just as profoundly. Newton conceived of lifeless, inert matter animated only by divine will. Leibniz saw the universe as an organic whole, its components in perpetual dynamic change. This perspective, vindicated by modern atomic theory, undermined Newton’s rigid mechanism. Leibniz also anticipated the First Law of Thermodynamics, asserting that the universe’s “force and vigor” were constant, merely shifting forms. Clarke, bound by theological necessity, upheld the view that God could add energy to the system as needed.

The debate was often bitter. Amid lofty discourse, one observer urged both men to pursue worthier endeavors. When Leibniz died in 1716, Newton’s ally, the Marquis de Conti, declared, “Mr. Leibniz is dead, and the dispute is finished.”

Yet another controversy outlived him. Catholic scholars largely rejected Chinese customs as incompatible with Christianity, but Leibniz, with his admiration for Chinese culture, advocated accommodation. He believed their rituals could harmonize with Christian practice and that understanding their traditions was essential to conversion. His broadmindedness contrasted sharply with the narrow nationalism that sullied his reputation in England, where unfounded accusations of plagiarism added insult to injury.

To his compatriots, he had become a relic, a man out of time. His funeral, sparsely attended, was a somber end for one of such towering intellect and boundless curiosity. Yet even in his final days, his faith in humanity’s potential endured:

"The human race will not always remain in this state. Divine harmony does not permit the eternal repetition of the same notes. Progress, whether gradual or by sudden leaps, is inevitable. Even apparent regressions are but preparations for greater leaps forward."

Thomas Young

The Last Man To Know Everything

"From time to time in history, men are born not into their rightful century but an age too soon, their genius so immense and self-sustained that the applause of their contemporaries seems but a trifling necessity." So mused Emerson, and no figure illustrates this truth better than the English polymath Thomas Young. Of him, Hermann von Helmholtz observed, “Young was among the most acute minds ever to grace the sciences, yet his bold conjectures leapt too far ahead of his age. His peers, though awed, could not follow, leaving his insights buried in the Transactions of the Royal Society, awaiting rediscovery by later minds better prepared to comprehend his genius.”

Young’s achievements spanned vast domains: he deciphered the Rosetta Stone, illuminated the mysteries of color perception, and laid the groundwork for the wave theory of light. His contributions were immortalized in concepts like the Young–Helmholtz Theory and Young’s Modulus, testaments to a mind of prodigious breadth. A physician, encyclopedist, and prolific author, he demonstrated that intellectual curiosity, when coupled with prodigious discipline, could breach the boundaries of ordinary human endeavor.

Born in Somersetshire on June 13, 1773, Young’s gifts emerged early. By age two, he had learned to read; by six, he had completed the Bible twice and embarked on mastering Latin. At boarding schools, he devoured Greek, French, and Italian while independently pursuing scientific inquiry. Deeming available instruments inadequate, he constructed his own telescopes and microscopes. Such precocity led psychologist Colin Martindale to reflect: “Young embodied the hallmarks of first-order genius—analogical thinking, insatiable curiosity, resistance to dogma, and a Herculean capacity for work.”

Though lauded posthumously by Einstein and Maxwell, Young faced accusations of dilettantism in his lifetime. A modern historian remarked, “Highly intelligent, he lacked the discipline to delve deeply. He excelled at synthesizing others’ ideas but rarely pursued his own with sufficient rigor.” This judgment, however, overlooks the breadth of Young’s achievements and the self-taught audacity of a man free from the pressures of an illustrious lineage. Descended from unremarkable parents—a banker and a merchant’s daughter—Young stood in stark contrast to prodigies like John Stuart Mill, whose gifts were cultivated through relentless parental oversight.

Young’s Quaker upbringing left its mark. His faith valued simplicity and abhorred ostentation, yet it nurtured a disproportionate number of great scientists and physicians. His uncle, Richard Brocklesby, a physician and Royal Society fellow, guided his early education and offered sage advice: “Avoid spiritual pride in your facility with language, which is but the dross of knowledge.” Young absorbed these lessons alongside moral convictions, abstaining from sugar for seven years in protest of slavery, true to his faith’s abolitionist ethos.

At boarding school, Young’s brilliance outpaced his peers. At nine, he completed a mathematics text far ahead of his classmates. By fourteen, he had mastered thirteen languages. Anecdotes of his youth reveal a charming blend of precocity and perseverance. Once, a bookseller wagered that Young could keep a rare Greek tome if he translated a page on the spot. To the man’s astonishment, Young did so with effortless fluency.

Despite these triumphs, illness intervened. At fifteen, Young contracted tuberculosis, enduring bleeding and blistering under treatments from Brocklesby and Thomas Dimsdale, moderate by the barbaric standards of the day. The ordeal, though painful, brought him closer to his uncle, who urged him to embrace the intellectual rigor exemplified by Aristotle, Cicero, and Newton. Brocklesby, quoting Edmund Burke, envisioned Young not as a mere practitioner of science but as a philosopher who might “emulate a Bacon or a Newton in the fullness of time.”

By seventeen, Young had absorbed the major works of antiquity in their original languages and delved into Newton’s Opticks, laying the groundwork for his later contributions to wave theory. His youthful endeavors in botany and barometry gave way to more profound inquiries, reflecting his preference for theory over experiment: “He found the sacrifice of time great, the success of trials uncertain.” His own writings suggest a measured pace of intellectual consumption, noting, “Perhaps the works he studied in fifty years number no more than a thousand, a fraction of what others devoured in a decade.”

William King, now an obscure figure even among literary scholars, fades into history while Thomas Young's journey from youthful ambition to medical study illuminates an age of contrasts. Undoubtedly influenced by his uncle and a lingering illness, Young resolved to pursue medicine. Leaving the pastoral serenity of Barclay’s estate, he entered the vibrant, macabre world of London’s Hunterian School of Anatomy, where John Hunter’s renown and peculiar methods attracted many bright pupils. Brocklesby, with evident admiration, sweetened the path by offering Young a portion of his estate if he followed in his footsteps—an enticing proposal for a young man of modest means surrounded by wealthier peers.

Hunter’s school promised each student a cadaver, but this seemingly morbid privilege came with grim realities. The supply of fresh bodies fell to the infamous Resurrection Men, who plundered graveyards under the cloak of night. "Many a bereaved relative followed an empty coffin through Georgian London," recounts Wendy Moore, capturing the era’s grotesque underbelly. The cadavers' rapid decay in an age devoid of refrigeration added urgency to their studies. Yet, amid this ghastly enterprise, the intellectual stimulus proved unparalleled. It was in this setting, while observing the dissection of an ox’s eye, that Young’s curiosity about the mechanics of ocular accommodation—a problem first addressed by Descartes and Kepler—was ignited.

This fascination led to his first significant scientific contribution, a paper presented to the Royal Society at the age of 20. “How this accommodation is effected has long been a matter of dispute,” Young stated, as he sought to unravel the mystery. Earlier observations by George Porterfield suggested that the lens played a crucial role in adjusting focus for varying distances, but the mechanism remained elusive. Young proposed that the lens itself changed curvature—a hypothesis partially correct but incomplete, as later discoveries revealed the role of the ciliary muscles in this intricate process.

Young’s presentation stirred controversy. John Hunter, through his student Everard Home, claimed precedence, casting a shadow of plagiarism upon Young’s reputation. Despite whispers of betrayal, perhaps stemming from casual disclosures at one of Brocklesby’s gatherings, Young’s measured demeanor and body of work prevailed against such aspersions. Home’s influential reputation forced Young to retract his theory temporarily, yet the setback only sharpened his resolve. Within seven years, Young would conduct experiments to substantiate his insights, leaving a more enduring legacy.

From London, Young journeyed to Edinburgh, drawn by the city’s intellectual vitality and practical advantages. Its universities, offering inexpensive tuition and instruction in the vernacular, lacked the religious barriers imposed by Oxford and Cambridge on Quakers. En route, Young encountered Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, who praised him in a letter of introduction: “He unites the scholar with the philosopher and the cultivation of modern arts with the simplicity of ancient manners.”

In Edinburgh, Young, defying Quaker asceticism, embraced the pleasures of music and dance, though his exacting nature shone through even here. Legend has it that after his first dance lesson, he meticulously traced the steps with a compass. His intellectual appetite remained insatiable, consuming Don Quixote, Orlando Furioso, and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Yet Young’s critical mind spared few from scrutiny; he described Johnson’s work as “a mixture of strength, pedantry, and prejudice.”

Mounted on a sturdy black horse, Young embarked on his journey to Scotland, relishing the unpredictable romance of travel. "To lose one’s way in a dark night, to ford deep waters, to cross mountains, and then be welcomed into splendor as a lord might receive a knight-errant," he wrote, "these vicissitudes echo the chivalrous tales of old." Thus began his next chapter, a narrative marked by equal measures of intellect and adventure, ambition and resilience.

By his own account, Young found immense delight in dancing and conversing with the ladies of Scotland, a pleasure his biographer, Thomas Peacock, described as a "passionate fondness" for female company. Young recorded his encounters in his travel log, a lively testament to his experiences:

"I was showing Lady C. some of my sketches; she begged to see my notes, and I showed the greatest part of them. All the family are musical; the ladies sing admirably; cards and the fine piano occupied the evening. After supper, besides other songs, I heard a most beautiful canzonet. It was twelve o’clock when we retired. After breakfast, I took my leave, not without regretting that I had so little time to observe the beauties of Inverary. Lady Charlotte is handsomer than Lady Augusta, she sings better, but she has less good sense and sweetness. An innocent giddiness sometimes gives her the appearance of a little affectation; she is to Lady Augusta what Venus is to Minerva. I suppose she wishes for no more. Both are goddesses."

As his journey concluded, Young confided his newfound love of travel to his mother:

“I think I cannot better spend the next two years of my life than in attending (at the same time I continue my scientific pursuits under the most eminent professors in different parts of Europe) to the various forms into which the customs and habits of different countries have moulded the human mind; in imitating what is laudable, and in avoiding what is culpable, and in exerting myself to gain the acquaintance and friendship of the virtuous and learned.”

Unusually cosmopolitan for an English scientist of his era, Young refused to let nationalism blind him to the shortcomings of his own universities. His journey took him to Göttingen, where he not only mastered German but strengthened his belief in the virtues of cross-cultural exchange. He remarked, “Science here has one advantage—that the doctrines of both countries are well known here, while the English attend little to any opinions but those of their own country.”

Young’s dissertation, a Latin work dedicated to his uncle Brocklesby, revealed his dual passions for language and anatomy. In it, he proposed a 47-letter alphabet encompassing all human sounds, a tool he hoped would aid the study of oral languages in Africa and the Americas. After graduating, he toured Germany and Austria, mingling with Europe’s intellectual elite. Nearly two years later, legislation requiring physicians to spend two consecutive years at one institution forced Young to return to school. He applied to Cambridge, renouncing his Quaker faith to gain admission.

Though his renunciation did not initially excommunicate him, Young’s attendance at “places of public diversion” led to eventual expulsion from the Quaker Church. He accepted this with resignation, seeking to “make the best of it.” His Cambridge experience proved underwhelming, and lectures often covered material he had already mastered. Most of his time was spent in solitary study, a disenchantment his first biographers, both Cambridge alumni, sought to obscure. Yet Young openly criticized England’s educational lag, asserting the nation was “forty years behind the continent.”

Young’s dispassionate objectivity was encapsulated by a contemporary's sketch: “He seldom gave an opinion, and never volunteered one. He never laid down the law like other learned doctors or uttered apothegms. A philosophical fact, a difficult calculation, or a new invention would engage his attention, but he never spoke of morals, metaphysics, or religion. At the same time, no sceptical doubt, loose assertion, or idle scoff ever escaped him.”

Following graduation, the death of Brocklesby brought Young a substantial inheritance, which he prudently managed without succumbing to idleness. Selling the house, he returned to London to begin his career. Financially secure yet industrious, Young resumed his study of ocular accommodation, testing hypotheses through self-experimentation. Initially believing the lens to be muscular, he later withheld speculation on its exact mechanism in his 1801 On the Mechanism of the Eye.

That same year, he presented On the Theory of Light and Colors to the Royal Society, advancing a revolutionary hypothesis on color vision. Rejecting the prevailing view that the eye contained receptors for every hue, Young proposed that combinations of a few receptors accounted for the perception of the spectrum. “It becomes necessary to suppose the number limited,” he reasoned, introducing the concept of color blending.

While Newton’s prism had confirmed light’s spectrum, Young's theory bridged physics and biology, prefiguring later empirical validation. His suggestion that green, an intermediate wavelength, stimulated both yellow and blue receptors foreshadowed Helmholtz's work and eventual proof in 1959.

Contemporaneously, John Dalton, himself colorblind, offered a personal account of red-green deficiency, later termed Daltonism: “That part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. The orange, yellow, and green seem one color, descending from an intense to a rare yellow.” Both men’s contributions underscored the profound intersection of personal experience and scientific insight.

Dalton, pondering the origin of his color blindness, attributed it to a discoloration of his aqueous humor—an idea less implausible than the competing notions of his time. The intricate mechanisms of rods and cones had not yet been uncovered, nor had the brain's role as the arbiter of sensory data been fully explored. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, published over two decades earlier, hinted at the innate structures of perception but did not reach English audiences until its 1839 translation. Nevertheless, its influence had traversed the insular intellectual borders of Britain, which Young himself lamented. There is no evidence Dalton read Kant, yet the zeitgeist was alive with the idea of perception’s preordained frameworks. Later examinations of Dalton’s preserved eyes revealed his color blindness stemmed, not from humor discoloration, but from defective photoreceptors—a prosaic yet profound truth.

James Clerk Maxwell, reflecting on Young’s trichromatic theory of vision later in the 19th century, remarked, “Thomas Young was the first who, starting from the well-known fact that there are three primary colors, sought for the explanation of this fact, not in the nature of light but in the constitution of man.” This insight, revolutionary in its time, bore the mark of a mind that sought simplicity amid complexity.

Yet Young, despite his intellectual stature, was no orator. His presentations, especially when compared to the electrifying lectures of Sir Humphry Davy, were noted for their somnolent quality. A director of the Royal Society dubbed him a “narcoleptically boring speaker.” Nonetheless, in 1802, Young began a lecture with an elegant prologue, stirring in its aspiration, even if his delivery lulled his listeners:

“Those who possess the genuine spirit of scientific investigation, and who have tasted the pure satisfaction arising from an advancement in intellectual acquirements, are contented to proceed in their researches, without inquiring at every step what they gain by their newly discovered lights, and to what practical purposes they are applicable: they receive a sufficient gratification from the enlargement of their views of the constitution of the universe, and experience, in the immediate pursuit of knowledge, that pleasure which others wish to obtain more circuitously by its means. And it is one of the principal advantages of a liberal education, that it creates a susceptibility of an enjoyment so elegant and so rational.”

Here, Young expressed not a mystical idealism but the Enlightenment ethos of reasoned inquiry. Though unattached to philosophical systems, his words echoed the period’s reverence for untainted pursuit of truth. As his focus shifted from ophthalmology to optics, he confronted Newton’s corpuscular theory of light. Newton had envisioned light as a stream of particles; Huygens, conversely, posited it as a wave traversing an invisible ether. Though peculiar to modern ears, the ether addressed the perplexing reality that light, unlike sound, moved through vacuums. Yet Newton’s model faltered under scrutiny, as Huygens observed: when light met a boundary, some refracted while some reflected—a behavior particles alone could not explain.

It is unclear whether Young deliberately embodied the Enlightenment’s sapere aude or merely acted on his innate disposition. To question Newton was tantamount to heresy, for in the pantheon of science, Newton’s authority bordered on divine. Yet Young, undeterred, replied with measured defiance:

“But, much as I venerate the name of Newton, I am not therefore obliged to believe that he was infallible. I see, not with exultation, but with regret, that he was liable to err, and that his authority has, perhaps, sometimes even retarded the progress of science.”

One fatal flaw in Newton’s corpuscular theory lay in the phenomenon of interference, whereby waves combine to either amplify or cancel one another. If light were purely particulate, the results of Young’s double-slit experiment should have mirrored the outcome of a single slit, only duplicated. Instead, the experiment revealed the interference patterns characteristic of waves. Young demonstrated the principle with a vivid analogy:

“Suppose a number of equal waves of water to move upon the surface of a stagnant lake, with a certain constant velocity, and to enter a narrow channel leading out of the lake. Suppose then another similar cause to have excited another equal series of waves, which arrive at the same time with the first. Neither series of waves will destroy the other, but their effects will be combined: if they enter the channel in such a manner that the elevations of one series coincide with those of the other, they must together produce a series of greater joint elevations; but if the elevations of one series are so situated as to correspond to the depressions of the other, they must exactly fill up those depressions. And the surface of the water must remain smooth; at least I can discover no alternative, either from theory or from experiment.”

With this elegant analogy, Young did more than refute Newton; he illuminated the profound duality of light. Yet his words, like ripples upon the water, met resistance from a world still steeped in reverence for its scientific demigods.

In 1804, Thomas Young married Eliza Maxwell, a union marked by harmony and mutual respect. Thomas Peacock, a biographer acquainted with the couple, described it as a happy marriage, with Eliza as a steadfast partner who buoyed her husband amidst the storms of controversy his theories provoked. Eliza herself characterized their bond as “a marriage of mutual affection and esteem, such as he had always looked forward to as the great object of his professional and other exertions, and secured him a home which was graced by all the refinements of good manners and a cultivated taste: it was a singularly happy marriage.” They had no children.

Even physics, the exalted jewel of the sciences, could not escape the jealousies and intrigues of its practitioners. Despite the empirical validation of Young’s wave theory of light, detractors emerged, chief among them Henry Brougham, whose critique was tainted by personal grievance. Years earlier, Young had critiqued a mathematical paper by Brougham, who now retaliated with venom. Assisted by Lord Blagden, a known disseminator of rumors, Brougham derided Young’s work, calling his Bakerian Lecture “another Bakerian Lecture, containing more fancies, more blunders, more unfounded hypotheses, more gratuitous fictions... all from the fertile, yet fruitless, brain of the same eternal Dr. Young.”

Young’s rejoinder was swift and incisive:

“Conscious of [his] inability to explain the [diffraction] experiment which I have advanced, too ungenerous to confess that inability, and too idle to repeat the experiment, he is compelled to advance the supposition that it was incorrect... The writer confesses that he has not ‘sufficient fancy to discover’ how the ‘interference of two portions of light’ could ever produce an appearance of color. The poverty of his fancy may indeed easily be admitted, but it is unfortunate that he either has not patience enough to read, or intellect enough to understand, the very papers that he is criticizing; for, if he had perused with common attention my Bakerian Lecture on light, he might have understood such a production of color without any exertion of fancy at all.”

Despite the controversies, Young pressed forward. Recently appointed to a long-sought position at a London hospital, he balanced his medical duties with his scientific inquiries. A polyglot and scholar of continental discoveries, Young was uniquely equipped to author a comprehensive treatise on the sciences. Published in 1807, Natural Philosophy echoed the spirit of Newton’s Principia. Across its two volumes, Young detailed the principles of physical and mechanical phenomena with clarity and precision.

Peacock lauded his writing: “We are surprised to find ourselves at the end of an investigation, even within the limits of space which would commonly be deemed hardly sufficient to master the difficulties which meet us at the beginning. But his rare sagacity hardly ever deserts him.”

Among Young’s enduring contributions was the formulation of Young’s modulus, an equation vital for predicting material deformation based on elasticity or rigidity—a tool indispensable to engineers. His contemplation of material properties naturally led him to the atomic theory. Alongside Dalton, Young championed this concept, though it remained contentious. Ever frugal in his hypotheses, Young rejected the idea of heat as a separate substance, seeing it instead as molecular motion.

While physics had ascended far beyond the speculations of Aristotle, medicine lagged behind, trapped in the paradigms of Hippocrates and Galen. Young authored two medical texts: a general treatise and another on consumptive disorders. These works critiqued both the prevailing dogmas and the myriad quack remedies of his time. Yet, his rigor and objectivity alienated patients and peers alike, who found his style too impersonal for their taste.

Joseph Pettigrew, in his biographies of eminent physicians, summarized Young’s dilemma: “He was perhaps too deeply informed, and therefore too sensible of the difficulty of arriving at true knowledge in the profession of medicine, hastily to form a judgment; and his great love of and adherence to truth made him often hesitate where others felt no difficulty whatever in the expression of their opinion.”

Young’s frustration found outlet in verse:

“Medical men, my mood mistaking,
Most mawkish, monstrous messes making,
Molest me much; more manfully,
My mind might meet my malady:
Medicine’s mere mockery murders me.”

The medical profession resisted admitting its immaturity. Peacock, empathetic to Young’s plight, remarked, “It is the peculiar misfortune of the medical profession that its members can rarely dare to confess their ignorance, thinking it more or less necessary—in order to maintain their influence with their patients and with the world—to speak with equal decision, whether they are authorized by their knowledge to do so or not.”

In 1814, at the age of 41, Thomas Young embarked upon the challenge of deciphering the Rosetta Stone. This ancient artifact bore inscriptions in hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian, and Greek. Where others assumed the hieroglyphs to be mere pictograms, Young suspected they represented words or phonemes. By 1819, when Champollion entered the field, Young was among the few linguists exploring the mysteries of the Egyptian language. Champollion, in contrast, was driven, fervent, and politically volatile—once even leading an insurrection against the French king in Grenoble. While Champollion immersed himself in Egypt’s history and culture, Young treated the task as a scholarly puzzle. Already celebrated for his many accomplishments, Young’s reputation did not hinge on this endeavor, whereas for Champollion, success was a matter of profound personal and national pride.

Young reflected magnanimously on their rivalry:

“The further [Champollion] advances by the exertion of his own talents and ingenuity, the more easily he will be able to admit, without any exorbitant sacrifice of his fame, the claim that I have advanced to a priority with respect to the first elements of all his researches; and I cannot help thinking that he will ultimately feel it most for his own substantial honor and reputation, to be more anxious to admit the just claims of others than they be to advance them.”

The rivalry unfolded against the backdrop of Anglo-French tensions, heightened by the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalism fueled the debate: the English credited Young with laying the groundwork, while the French countered that not all his assertions were correct. The Egyptologist John Ray distilled the matter:

“Young was the first person since the end of the Roman Empire to be able to read a demotic text, and, in spite of a proportion of incorrect guesses, he surely deserves to be known as the decipherer of demotic. It is no disservice to Champollion to allow him this distinction.”

The two eventually met in Paris, where Young noted in a letter to Gurney, “[Champollion] has shown me far more attention than I ever showed or could show, to any living being: he devoted seven whole hours at once to looking over with me his papers and the magnificent collection which is committed to his care.”

It is fortunate that Eliza likely never saw this letter. The image of the dispassionate intellectual, devoted wholly to the life of the mind, is an ideal that few achieve and fewer maintain in their personal lives. Yet equanimity was Young’s hallmark. While he possessed social graces and emotional intelligence, his passions were often reserved for scholarly pursuits.

Young’s genius lay in his aptitude for recognizing patterns and manipulating symbols. His extensive knowledge across disciplines and his familiarity with numerous scripts enabled him to discern the relationship between demotic and hieroglyphic writing—one a variation of the other. His broad learning made him uniquely suited to this intellectual puzzle. Moreover, as a general linguist, Young coined the term Indo-European to describe the family of languages connecting Sanskrit to the tongues of Europe, though he was not the first to recognize their relationship.

In the latter half of his life, Young made minor contributions to insurance and advised the British navy on ship construction. Despite no apparent predisposition to heart disease or harmful habits, he died at 56 from excessive ossification of his aorta.

Young’s name endures in textbooks across disciplines, his achievements scattered like luminous pearls across the sciences. Yet the man himself, disinterested in fame, would likely have been satisfied with this quiet legacy. He is remembered by those who share his unquenchable curiosity and love of learning. He spoke for such minds when he wrote:

“[H]is own idea was, that the faculties are more exercised, and therefore probably more fortified, by going a little beyond the rudiments only, and overcoming the great elementary difficulties, of a variety of studies, than by spending the same number of hours in any one pursuit: and it was generally more his object to cultivate his own mind than to acquire knowledge for others in departments which were not his immediate concern: while he thought with regard to the modern doctrines, of the division of labor, that they applied much less to mind than to matter, and that while they increased the produce of a workman’s physical strength, they tended to reduce his dignity in the scale of existence from a reasoning being, to a mere machine.”

John Stuart Mill

A Prodigies Prodigy

John Stuart Mill was an English prodigy who, in adulthood, shaped the intellectual contours of philosophy, economics, logic, and political science. As a public figure, activist, and member of Parliament, he engaged deeply with the practicalities of governance, diplomacy, and reform. Mill championed representative government, secularism, women’s rights, decentralization, economic freedom, and personal liberty long before these causes found broad acceptance. What now seems conventional was once radical, and Mill’s breadth of thought inspired an array of later thinkers. Central to his intellectual development was a lifelong quest for autonomy, a reaction to the formative pressures exerted upon him.

Born in London on May 20, 1806, John was the son of James Mill, a Scottish intellectual and staunch disciple of Jeremy Bentham. The elder Mill’s relentless pursuit of genius for his son profoundly shaped John’s early life, as did the towering influence of Bentham.

Jeremy Bentham, a polymath and eccentric bachelor, pursued disparate ventures, from a primitive telephone to his infamous prison design, the Panopticon. Ironically, debts incurred promoting the Panopticon nearly landed him in debtor’s prison. A prodigy himself, Bentham read voluminous histories as a toddler and began Latin at three. Though trained in law, he never practiced, devoting his energies instead to radical reform. He advocated for free speech, animal rights, the abolition of slavery, gender equality, and—scandalously—the decriminalization of homosexuality. Dismissed as radicals by both Whigs and Tories, Bentham and his followers exalted reason above custom, inspired by the French philosophes.

Bentham’s empiricist psychology, termed associationism, posited that mental phenomena arose from the association of perceptual elements. This mechanistic view of the mind influenced James Mill and later informed John’s philosophy. Yet, Bentham’s utilitarianism—reducing ethics to the maximization of pleasure—was often criticized as cold and reductive. His request to be mummified upon death added to his eccentricity; his preserved remains now reside at University College London.

Bentham’s simplistic utilitarianism, however, must not be confused with John Stuart Mill’s more nuanced ethical vision, which sought to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures.

James Mill, too, was precocious, earning the patronage of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart. As tutor to their daughter, James fell in love with her, a passion thwarted by the constraints of class. This experience seeded his deep resentment of England’s rigid social hierarchy. Later, he named his own daughter Wilhelmina after his unfulfilled love. Though he became a Presbyterian minister, his sermons were deemed overly intellectual, and his family faced financial hardship until the publication of The History of India.

James Mill’s life work, however, became the molding of his eldest son. Adhering to a belief in nurture over nature, he sought to shape John into a morally and intellectually perfect man. Yet James retained a Calvinist rigor, despite his nominal radicalism, and clung to traditional views of women’s roles. John recalled his father as a man who “professed the greatest contempt for passionate emotions.” Harriet Barrow, John’s mother, lived a subdued life, rarely challenging her husband. A sibling described their parents’ relationship as one of “two persons, a husband and wife, living as far apart, under the same roof, as the north pole from the south.”

As a teacher, James was exacting, demanding his son reread difficult texts until mastered. To outsiders, he often displayed a harsh demeanor toward his family. One observer recalled:

“The one really disagreeable trait in James Mill’s character, and the thing that has left the most painful memories, was the contemptuous way he allowed himself to speak and behave to his wife and children before visitors. When we read his letters to friends, we see him acting the family man with the utmost propriety, putting wife and children into their due place; but he seemed unable to observe this part in daily intercourse.”

Mill’s education is often portrayed as relentless cramming, yet while his life brimmed with study and intellectual engagement, James Mill understood that true learning required more than rote memorization. The father sought not just knowledge but understanding, guiding his son through dialogue and the company of eminent minds.

“A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the principle of losing no time, was likely to adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek; I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation…

Much of it consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father’s discourses to me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end of 1813 we were living in Newington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood. My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes towards Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance, this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these in the morning walks, I told the story to him; for the books were chiefly histories, of which I read in this manner a great number: Robertson’s histories, Hume, Gibbon; but my greatest delight, then and for long afterwards, was Watson’s Philip the Second and Third.

In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of, many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself.”

Raised in a secular household, John later wrote of his father: “Finding, therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in a state of perplexity, until, doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to the conviction, that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion; for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd.”

From an early age, John aided his father with editing dense manuscripts and official documents, even composing histories of England and Roman governance as a child. By 14, he had mastered most classical works, and by 16, he was well-versed in economics, politics, mathematics, and philosophy. That same year, he joined the East India Company, where he juggled an industrious workload, producing two volumes annually, while pursuing his broader intellectual ambitions. Yet his achievements never inflated his ego—a humility instilled by his father’s stern parenting methods. Reflecting without bitterness in his Autobiography, Mill recalled:

“[My father] completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age. If I accidentally had my attention drawn to the fact that some other boy knew less than myself–which happened less often than might be imagined–I concluded, not that I knew much, but that he, for some reason or other, knew little, or that his knowledge was of a different kind from mine. My state of mind was not humility, but neither was it arrogance. I never thought of saying to myself, I am, or I can do, so and so. I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly: I did not estimate myself at all. If I thought anything about myself, it was that I was rather backward in my studies, since I always found myself so, in comparison with what my father expected from me.”

While Mill modestly insisted that his accomplishments stemmed from careful training rather than innate genius, observers like H.R. Bourne marveled at his prodigious memory. Bourne noted:

“Nothing escaped his notice at the time of its occurrence: nothing was forgotten by him afterwards. His friends often found, to their astonishment, that he knew far more about any passages in their lives that he had been made aware of than they could themselves remember; and, whenever that disclosure was made to them, they must have been rejoiced to think, that this memory of his, instead of being, as it might well have been, a dangerous garner of severe judgments and fairly-grounded prejudices, was a magic mirror, in which their follies and foibles were hardly at all reflected, and only kindly reminiscences and generous sympathies found full expression.”

Oxford, with its Anglican oath, was never an option for a skeptic raised in a household hostile to orthodoxy. By his teen years, Mill had outgrown the need for formal education and had begun to question the rigid Benthamite ideals of his mentors. Longing for intellectual independence, he suffered a nervous breakdown at 20. In his Autobiography, he described this bleak period with poignant honesty:

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first ‘conviction of sin.’ In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them–would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter.”

Dr. A.W. Levi suggests that Mill’s existential crisis stemmed from a deeply repressed yearning to assert independence against his father’s dominating will.

“In reading Marmontel’s account, John, through the veil of identification, could without guilt confront the inevitable reality that his father, in the natural order of things, would one day die, leaving him to assume the role of command... Under the imaginative conditions of literature, absolved of culpable desire, Mill brought to the light of consciousness what had long been laboriously suppressed. In this catharsis, he spontaneously found the resolution to his torment.”

Dr. Peter Glassman interprets this crisis as a necessary transformation: “It compelled him to live with greater authenticity, to recognize and repudiate the loneliness and suffering he had always concealed and stoically endured.” The subsequent decade, though marked by public quietude, proved internally fruitful. His twenties were spent absorbing and reconciling ideas, partly from the uncertainty of youth and partly from fear of censure by elder Utilitarians should he stray too far from orthodoxy. He read voraciously and forged friendships with many leading intellects, among them Thomas Carlyle, to whom he confessed:

“I am often near skepticism, without any coherent theory of human life, vacillating among conflicting beliefs. This unsettled state, though recent and transitory, will yield to firmer convictions forged by broader experience.”

And so it was.

“I feel once more the sense of growth. My knowledge is richer, more grounded in realities than abstractions, and this understanding will grant me greater power to perform the work before me—or to discern the work most worthy of my efforts.”

In 1836, James Mill succumbed to a series of pulmonary afflictions, likely tuberculosis. At thirty, John grieved deeply. His own health faltered, his spirit burdened by the loss of a father who had both molded his intellect and suppressed his individuality. Yet from this mourning emerged a man freer to define his destiny. The passing of the stern patriarch who had given so much—and demanded so much—allowed Mill to assert his own identity.

By 1838, his Essay on Bentham appeared, critiquing the philosopher who famously equated the game of push-pin with the arts of music and poetry. Mill, long constrained by Bentham’s stark utilitarianism, now voiced his misgivings. While he admired Bentham’s audacity in challenging authority, he acknowledged his limitations:

“Bentham’s understanding of human nature was narrow, wholly empirical, and drawn from limited experience. His life, unmarred by adversity or the depths of passion, left him insulated from the trials that deepen understanding. He lived in unbroken health, free from sorrow or weariness, remaining a boy until his final years.”

Two years later, Mill published his essay on Coleridge, continuing his reconciliation of intellect and sentiment. The Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, offered him solace from the stark rationalism of his upbringing. Their works awakened in him a newfound appreciation for nature’s beauty and the depth of human emotion, counterbalancing his analytical education. Mill lamented the English tendency to suppress feeling, seeking instead an integration of reason and heart.

Amid these intellectual pursuits, another influence took root. In 1830, Mill met Harriet Taylor, a brilliant and charismatic woman bound in an unhappy marriage. Their mutual affection blossomed into a profound, if unconventional, relationship. To avoid scandal, they refrained from physical intimacy, and Harriet eventually lived apart from her husband. After his death in 1849, she and Mill married two years later.

During their long and purportedly chaste relationship, Mill produced some of his most influential works. His Principles of Political Economy explored not just the creation of wealth but its distribution, marking him as a transitional figure in economic thought. Though his contributions to concepts like comparative advantage, opportunity cost, and innovation remain significant, he is often overlooked in modern economics courses. Unlike his predecessors, Mill recognized the complexities of economic systems and foresaw the unpredictability of outcomes, emphasizing variables such as technological progress. He rejected the dogma of unrestrained growth:

“I am not enamored with a life of perpetual struggle and competition, where trampling and elbowing define progress. Such is but an unpleasant phase of industrial advancement, not the ideal of human existence.”

This sentiment placed him at odds with the emerging doctrines of social Darwinism. While he disagreed with Herbert Spencer, its chief proponent, Mill supported Spencer’s Principles of Philosophy financially, demonstrating his characteristic magnanimity.

Although influenced by David Ricardo, Mill diverged from pure laissez-faire economics, recognizing both the benefits of markets and the risks of collectivism. His nuanced view acknowledged socialism’s ideals while critiquing its practical flaws:

“Socialists often overlook humanity’s natural inertia, its tendency toward passivity and habit. Competition, though imperfect, remains indispensable to progress, and no one can foresee when it might cease to be so.”

Early in his career, Mill asserted:

“Governments should not hinder men from expressing opinions, pursuing trades, or engaging in commerce as they see fit. Beyond preventing force and fraud, interference often does more harm than good.”

Through such reflections, Mill evolved into a thinker who harmonized the rational and the romantic, the individual and the collective, forging a philosophy as broad and complex as the life he lived.

In Principles of Political Economy, Mill weaves his advocacy for women’s suffrage into the broader tapestry of his economic and social theories. Yet even in his seminal work, A System of Logic, ostensibly devoted to epistemological rigor, he found room to champion individual freedoms and public education. At the time, logic in Western thought lingered in the shadow of syllogisms and deductions from axiomatic truths. Mill’s methods, however, fortified the nascent discipline of induction, offering a framework for discerning causality that endures. His “method of agreement,” the first of five, asserts: “if two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.”

Mill’s partnership with Harriet was a union of intellect and passion, an antidote to the austere silence of his childhood home, where his mother deferred to James Mill’s intellectual dominance. Harriet, in contrast, actively joined in discourse, becoming not only Mill’s confidante and editor but also his equal. Her death in 1858 devastated him. He mourned her as his life’s saving grace, writing, “Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.” Harriet’s daughter, Helen, remained in touch with Mill until his death, but he neither remarried nor sought another romantic bond.

In his widowhood, Mill turned with fervor to questions of liberty and governance. In On Liberty, he championed personal freedoms while proposing mandatory public education and competency tests for suffrage. “Once in every year,” he wrote, “the examination should be renewed, with a gradually extending range of subjects... so as to make the universal acquisition, and what is more, retention, of a certain minimum of general knowledge, virtually compulsory.” Although committed to democratic ideals, Mill harbored an aristocracy of the intellect, writing to Harriet that genius required freedom to thrive: “Persons of genius... are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.”

Mill’s dedication to women’s rights provoked both ridicule and reverence. In The Subjection of Women, he proclaimed, “The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” He dismissed claims of innate female inferiority as products of cultural distortion, writing, “They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised.”

In his final years, Mill settled in Avignon, near Harriet’s grave, where he penned his last reflections on freedom and governance. When he died in 1873, he was buried beside her, their graves becoming a pilgrimage site for admirers. Though associated with Bentham and the radicals, he was, as one biographer put it, “the last great Romantic.” Tributes flowed from those he inspired: “He may have blundered and stumbled in his pursuit of truth; but... honesty of purpose is the only indispensable requisite for the nearest approach towards truth of which each individual is capable.”

Mill was not merely a man of profound thought but also one of profound feeling, a thinker who found his truths through both reason and the heart.

End