A Portrait of Isaac Newton

Not recognizing that men are free to choose, if they will, to judge themselves with painstaking objectivity, with the truth as their standard, [Manuel] considers all men to be vultures feeding off each other’s approbation. Thus a man like Newton—who chooses differently—has no place in Manuel’s deterministic scheme. The facts of his life must therefore be contorted into strange and show more implausible shapes in order to fit the form of Manuel’s theory. show less