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& his Head scarcely comb'd.” It took very little to make him forget the immediate moment and go<br />
off on an IN tangent: “...when he had friends to entertain at his chamber, if he stept in to his study<br />
for a bottle of wine, and a thought came into his head, he would sit down to paper and forget his<br />
friends.” An INTJ's mind is continually at work.<br />
Newton ran his body to the ground in order to serve the needs of his mind. He viewed food and<br />
sleep as nuisances that prevented him from working. When pursuing his alchemical studies, he<br />
practically never left his laboratory. By a similar token, he wrote the Principia as if he was<br />
cramming for a final exam: “He very rarely went to Bed till 2 or 3 of the clock, sometimes not till 5<br />
or 6, lying about 4 or 5 hours...” The singleminded focus with which this INTJ pursued his project<br />
of interest is characteristic of all Rationals.<br />
He ate while standing up and writing, and was noted for never taking time off for fun. A<br />
relative/coworker recalled, “I never knew him take any Recreation or Pastime, either in Riding out<br />
to take the Air, Walking, bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours lost, that was<br />
not spent in his Studyes, to which he kept so close, that he seldom left his Chamber unless at Term<br />
Time...”<br />
Newton followed the adage that a change is as good as a rest. He simply exchanged one study for<br />
another:<br />
Constant study or reading requires a stronger bent & intenseness of thought than the mind can generally<br />
bear & though unwilling to be altogether idle that the whole burden may not be always [be] a duty is<br />
forced to call the senses often in to her [hand] to rest upon as it were & divert her self with Musick &<br />
statuary & painting but Sir I. had no releif but going from one study to another, from Philosophy to<br />
Chronology, & from Chronology to divinity – showing out new discoveries & dispelling the clouds &<br />
darkness that were cast over them<br />
It was Newton's NT appetite for work, his INTJ precision, and his IN preoccupation with abstract<br />
matters—plus a hefty dose of intelligence—that made it possible for him to make his<br />
breakthroughs.<br />
Let's jump forward a few years to when Newton finally published the Principia—you know, the one<br />
that Bowditch would find an error in a century later. (No one's perfect, right?) Besides the obvious<br />
scientific value of the work, it had another feature that provides us with insight into the Rational<br />
character.<br />
In Newton's time, it wasn't as important as it is now to prove theories with actual experiments using<br />
actual numbers. Newton disagreed strongly with this approach; he backed up his claims with<br />
scrupulous mathematics based on recorded observations. Newton was one of the first to require<br />
Intuition to be vetted by Thinking. The predominantly Rational scientific community approved of<br />
the new idea that had been released into into the collective bloodstream, and obviously things have<br />
only stayed this way. Newton famously described his new approach in the Preface by saying, “I do<br />
not make hypotheses.”<br />
There is one other interesting note about the Principia. Rationals hate being criticized, especially<br />
by fools, and Newton was particularly sensitive to criticism. But how to prevent the unwashed<br />
masses from reading the Principia? Newton had a solution: he made it extremely difficult to read<br />
on purpose to weed out the unworthy. Cunning, yet fiendish.<br />
Bachelorhood<br />
The stereotype of the unmarried INTJ is deeply rooted in the MBTI internet community, or so I<br />
gather from the fact that the INTJ forum features the tagline, “Masterminds. Innovators. Villains.
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