In her biography of her father, Sir David Brewster, Maria Gordon described his emotional response to the memory of Isaac Newton and his youthful admiration of Colin MacLaurin's tombstone, at which he gazed and ‘pondered over the words, to be envied by every aspirant to scientific fame, “Newtone Suadente”’. The biography repeatedly reinforces the idea of a connection between Brewster and Newton, for example with an image of the ‘biographer and loving disciple’ standing before the moonlit statue of Newton at Cambridge. Maria even asserted that there ‘was much similarity between the genius, the characteristic individuality, and the career of both’, making the unlikely claim that had they ‘been contemporaries doubtless there could have been mutual warm personal sympathies’. More plausibly, she believed that ‘there was something approaching to the known and personal in the affectionate admiration which Brewster ever cherished for Newton’. Indeed, Brewster seemed to feel a personal injury from the perceived attack on Newton in Biot's 1822 article.

Although Brougham and the SDUK had accepted Biot's interpretation of Newton's life, Brewster viewed it as deeply threatening. He chose to respond with his own biography, The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, in which he analysed Biot's evidence for Newton's breakdown and introduced new material to refute the Frenchman's conclusion. This material helped to counter claims that Newton's faculties had been permanently impaired and that, after 1692–3, he studied only theology. However, it also added weight to the supposition that an illness, which at least temporarily affected Newton's mental health, had occurred. Brewster also used the Life to publicize a number of agendas that he considered fundamentally important to the progress of science and which reflect his writings on the ‘decline of science’ debate. Brewster's views on the support of science by private and government patronage were informed by both his experience of trying to forge a scientific career and his understanding of the nature of scientific genius.