In 1851, George Wilson, a gifted physician and chemist (and author of the first monograph on colour-blindness), published a book-length biography of Cavendish that not only covered every aspect of his life's work, but portrayed his eccentricities of mind and behaviour in beautiful detail¹: He did not love; he did not hate; he did net hope; he did not fear; he did not worship as others do. He separated himself from his fellow men, and apparently from God. There was nothing earnest, enthusiastic, heroic, or chivalrous in his nature, and as little was there anything mean, grovelling, or ignoble. He was almost passionless. All that needed for its apprehension more than the pure intellect, or required the exercise of fancy, imagination, affection, or faith, was distasteful to Cavendish. An intellectual head thinking, a pair of wonderfully acute eyes observing, and a pair of very skilful hands experimenting or recording, are all that I realise in reading his memorials. His brain seems in have been but a calculating engine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands instruments of manipulation which never trembled with emotion, or were clasped together in adoration, thanksgiving, or despair; his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for the circulation of the blood...Henry Cavendish: An early case of Asperger's syndrome? 查看存档
