Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher, 1773-1829 (review)

Book Reviews117 morning in October, 1656, and his even more wondrous behavior thereafter —behavior which, fully appreciated only in our rime, has given him a secure place in the calendar of Quaker saints. To offer "a fresh approach" after three hundred years to the Nayler problem—this is no slight claim. Yet as one reads Geoffrey Nuttall's Presidential Address, delivered in October, 1953, one feels that he has amply justified the claim. Looking closely into the milieu in which Nayler moved, he has discovered a group deeply tinctured with the peculiar doctrines of Familism, especially the notions that Christ was "a Type, and but a Type," and that it was possible for a man "totally to be inhabited by Christ." This revelation throws a flood of light on Nayler's aberration, his tragic deviation from the Apostolic Christianity which the early Friends preached and lived. It gives new meaning and new drama to the Fox-Nayler conflict, the first crucial turning -point in Quaker history after Fox's Pendle Hill vision. Having set Nayler's "fall" in a new and revealing context, Dr. Nuttall turns to its sequel, shows how Nayler's developing theology reflected the lesson of his own agony and his spiritual recovery. "He had now come to grips with something which other Friends tended to overlook: the reality of evil and of sin, the continuing of temptation in the Christian's life. . . ." In Nayler's later writings, Nuttall suggests, Friends can find a salutary offset to the ebullient perfectionism of George Fox. Not that Nuttall undervalues Fox's contribution: his brilliant introduction to John Nickalls' edition of the Journal testifies to that. But we are not all of Fox's caliber, and "for less heroic souls a rigorous . . . perfectionism easily becomes a shallow humanism, in which sin is overlooked, not overcome." "For a balanced theology," Nuttall concludes, "Nayler's realistic perception that the struggle with sin continues and Nayler's pity for the bemused, backsliding Christian are indispensable." F. B. T. Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher, 1773-1829. By Alexander Wood and Frank Oldham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954. XX, 355 pages. $6.00. Few men have ever touched human knowledge at so many points or in such telling fashion as did Thomas Young. He demonstrated remarkable ability in so many ways that he deserves the name of genius, although he himself would never have claimed such a designation. Thomas Young was born of a Quaker family at Milverton in Somersetshire in 1773 and died in London in 1829 when he was slighdy less than fifty-six years old. His notable accomplishments have made him the object of three or four previous biographical works, this latest being the result of many years of careful research by the late British scientist, Alexander Wood. After Wood's death in 1950, the last third of the work was brought to completion by another of Young's biographers, Frank Oldham. Thomas Young was a doctor, but therein lies perhaps his least claim to remembrance, except for his contributions to our knowledge of the eye 118Bulletin of Friends Historical Association and of color vision. These were no mean contributions, but they stem from his lifelong interest in natural philosophy. In the early years of the Royal Institution, founded in 1800 by Count Rumford, Young was a principal figure and gave a course of lectures in Natural Philosophy which led to the publication of his greatest single work in the field. It was during these few years with the Royal Institution that he made the first important break with the eighteenth century concerning the nature of light, a century dominated by the thinking of Newton. By experimental means, he discovered the interference of light and so laid the foundation for the wave theory which held sway throughout most of the nineteenth century. His was the credit for opening this new and fruitful field, but to the French scientist, Fresnel, goes the credit for bringing it to a high state of cultivation . As Fresnel said in correspondence with Young, "You have gathered the flowers; I have dug painfully to discover the roots." The inscription to Thomas Young in Westminster Abbey (near the tomb...