Sir Isaac Newton - alchemist

[David Guyatt]

John Maynard Keynes is known to most people as an economist and for developing Keynesian economics in particular.

Keynes is far less well known for something else, equally remarkable. For it was Keynes who brought to the world, in 1947, the fact that Isaac Newton was a notable alchemist.

http://www.hypatiamaze.org/isaac/newton.html

Isaac Newton: a Christian Alchemist


From the time of Voltaire, Isaac Newton has been portrayed as the "supreme rationalist." While his biographers concentrated on his great scientific and mathematical achievements, they all but suppressed his interests in religion, magic, and alchemy. Things changed in 1947, when the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay about Newton's work in alchemy. He had just purchased a cache of Newton's alchemical notes and manuscripts at a public auction which university libraries had rejected as worthless. Eventually, renegade researchers got access to these forgotten writings of Newton. By the 1970's, revisionist papers started to appear revealing a very different Newton. Today, science historians have been forced to admit that Newton was, in fact, a deeply religious man. At the heart of his religion was his fervent belief in alchemy.

While Newton was formulating his most important scientific theories and creating the calculus, he was privately studying alchemical and religious texts simultaneously. Science, alchemy, and Chrisitianity are co-mingled in Newton's mind, that is clear from a comparison of his private and published writings. Newton wrote about a million words on the subject of alchemy, none of it published. He also kept meticulous records of his alchemical experiments over a 25 year period, from the middle of the 1660's to 1695. Ultimately, Newton used the pneuma concept of alchemy to infuse the mechanical universe of Descartes with an active, all-knowing spirit of God. There can be no doubt that religion was the primary motivation for Newton's scientific work and that alchemy, in particular, influenced his concept of gravity and of force in general.


Newton in fancy dress, from a 1970 English one pound note.

Before describing Newton's alchemical work, it is necessary to explain a few things about Newton's Christian beliefs which are quite different from what most of us were taught in Sunday school. First, Newton believed that church teachings as practiced by Catholics and Anglicans were totally corrupted. Dan Brown used this fact in his book The Da Vinci Code. Specifically, Newton rejected the concept of the trinity because he did not believe that Jesus or the Holy Ghost were on an equal footing with God. Newton's God reigned supreme: all-knowing and present everywhere in the universe. Newton found that in nature there was much evidence of "choice" not "chance." If nature seems to follow physical "laws" consistantly, it is because God supervises each and every event taking place in the world. God, according to Newton, did not leave the scene after the creation. These were dangerous beliefs which Newton had to keep private since his job at Cambridge University depended on his public compliance with Anglican doctrines.

Newton's hostility towards Catholics, especially French Catholics, was not unusual in the 17th century after the English civil war. There were several plots by the French to place a Catholic king upon the English throne. Consequently, relations between England and France went from bad to worse. What is strange is Newton's belief that before the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, all of the laws of science were known and understood. Natural philosphers like himself were merely "recovering" knowledge from the time of Eden. Newton was the not the first natural philosopher to try to "Christianize" science and, in this way, make it less threatening. He kept it to himself, however; along with another surprising idea. He believed that ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato wrote about gravity and the inverse square law! Newton believed that he had found evidence of the inverse square law in the ancient concept of "the harmony of the spheres," specifically in the connection between tension and pitch in a stringed instrument. Newton spent years scouring ancient texts looking for more evidence of gravity buried in arcane symbolism.

A medieval alchemist at his still.
Click for more info about alchemical symbols


The more cryptic the symbolism, the more convinced Newton was that it contained some important truth. This is what attracted him to alchemy: an ancient, quasi-religion, rich in chemical symbols and bizarre drawings with human figures representing events in distillation experiments. Newton spent an enormous amount of time reading, copying, and writing about alchemical theories. He owned a total of 1752 books of which 369 were scientific and most of these were about alchemy. He also owned 170 books on what was called "practical magic."

In Newton's manuscript MS 3975, he kept 25 years of records of his alchemical experiments using gold, lead, and mercury metals. He also wrote 3 versions of an Index Chemicus with over 900 headings, 5000 page references, and 100 authors cited. During this time, he worked primarily alone in a shed near his room at Cambridge University. Sometimes his assistant, Humphrey Newton (no relation), worked with him. Newton shared some of his findings with other alchemists such as Robert Boyle, but most of his work he kept to himself. Unlike Boyle, Newton practiced what he called a "high silence." He thought of his work in alchemy as "noble" or sacred, not to be shared under any circumstances with lesser minds or, as Newton put it, "the vulgar."


Click for illustration of Newton's rooms at Cambridge.

After anlyzing Newton's unpublished manuscripts on alchemy, it is clear that Newton incorporated concepts from alchemy into his religious beliefs. Newton rejects Descartes' clockwork universe because it had no spiritual dimension. Instead, he infuses his universe with what he called a "vegetative spirit" or what alchemists called "the pneuma," a mysterious, holy energy from the Gods. He also believed there was an additional substance permeating all of 3-D space called the "ether." Light waves and sound waves as well as planets and stars traveled through this ether. Newton believed that it was the interaction between the pneuma and the ether with molecules of matter that gave rise to all the chemical reactions observed in nature.

To explain how matter was created in the universe, Newton adopted some ideas of Paracelsus, a Renaissance alchemist who was also something of a social activist. Paracelsus influenced different groups in Europe at different times. For example, he was popular with the French Huguenots; and in Bavaria, Germany, his alchemical philosophy was taught for a time in the universities. Paracelsus believed that the creation story in Genesis actually described the distillation of substances with God as the supreme adept. Adam, Eve, and the snake are symbols like the figures in an alchemical illustration. God the alchemist creates all the elements and minerals in the universe. In this way, alchemy is central to Newton's belief in Christianity and science.


Newton in 1702 based on a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller

Newton wanted to publish his theories about chemistry; he prepared several manuscripts. They were never published because he was afraid of lawsuits over priority. Eventually, disciples of Newtonianism published textbooks advancing Newton's chemical theories. In later editions of Opticks (1706, 1717), Newton speculated about how microscopic forces analogous to gravity might explain displacement reactions, precipitation, and other chemical phenomena. Supporters John Keill and John Freind published papers with experimental evidence for these attractive forces. In their papers they cited Newton as an authority. The word alchemy, however, is never used.


a 19th c. cartoon of Newton with a lady friend

Ironically, it is these alchemical beliefs which sustained Newton for two decades of intense study. He was socially isolated with only one or two friends and no wife, girlfriend or mistress. Voltaire wrote that, concerning women, Newton "had no passion or weakness." When his roomate at Cambridge moved out after 20 years, Newton suffered a deep depression or a psychotic break (historians aren't sure which). His roomate married and became a clergyman. Afterwards, Newton left Cambridge, and his most productive years were over. He got involved in running the Royal mint and presiding over the Royal Society. He never married, although he was certainly in a position to if he wanted. One website mockingly calls Newton "the 40-year-old virgin," and maybe he was. It seems that what people today find difficult to accept about Newton is that the great scientist was a celibate religious.

Copyright 2007 Allison Nies



FURTHER READING

The Last Sorcerer, by Michael White, 1997, Perseus Books

The Janus Faces of Genius, The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought, by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, 1991, Cambridge University Press

The Hunting of the Greene Lyon, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, 1975, Cambridge University Press

Let Newton Be!, edited by Fauvel, Flood, Shortland, and Wilson, 1988, Oxford University Press
"Newton, Matter, and Magic" by John Henry, page 127
"The Secret Life of an Alchemist" by Jan Golinski, page 147
"The God of Isaac Newton" by John Brooke, page 169

Newton, The Father of Modern Astronomy, by Jean-Pierre Maury, Documents: "Voltaire on Newton and Descartes," page 126, 1992, Abrams Inc. Publishers

Rembrandt's vision of the alchemical "Stone"