If I Have Seen Further It

Written in a letter to Robert Hooke dated February 5, 1675, this line is Newton's gracious acknowledgment of his debt to earlier thinkers. The phrase itself was not original to Newton — it derives from a twelfth-century saying attributed to Bernard of Chartres — but Newton gave it its most enduring form. The letter concerned their rivalry over the theory of light, and the passage is often read as a conciliatory gesture toward Hooke, who was himself a significant contributor to optics.