The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

intimate connection between the apples he observed and those he ate?

      The burgeoning vegetarian movement was quick to claim Newton as one of their own, triggering a debate that has raged ever since. Newton’s personal acquaintance, the vegetarian doctor George Cheyne, often used him as a shining example of the benefits of a flesh-free diet: ‘Sir Isaac Newton, when he studied or composed,’ claimed Cheyne, ‘had only a Loaf, a Bottle of Sack and Water, and took no Sustenance then but a Slice and a weak Draught as he found Failure of Spirits’.¹⁰ Albrecht von Haller inserted this exciting data into his highly respected Elementa Physiologiae, and from then on it was repeated time and time again by vegetarians trying to prove that their diet enhanced mental acuity.¹¹ By 1860 the American vegetarians Sylvester Graham and Amos Bronson Alcott were making such capital out of this claim that their opponents, Andrew Combe and James Coxe, felt compelled to defend Newton from this slur on his character. With indignant bluster, they complained that ‘Allusion is sometimes made to Sir Isaac Newton, as another example of the beneficial effects of a vegetable diet’; but, they continued, it was obvious that Newton ate meat because he ‘occasionally suffered from gout’, the classic ailment of carnivores.¹² Heedless of such remonstrances, scores of vegetarian societies around the world still list Newton among their favourite predecessors.

      The denial that he was vegetarian seemed to have gained a sure footing when, in a bundle of household papers, a bill was found showing that one goose, two turkeys, two rabbits and one chicken were delivered to Newton’s household in the space of a single week. In addition, at the time of his death Newton owed £10 16s 4d to a butcher and a total of £2 8s 9d to a poulterer and a fishmonger. This surely shows that Newton indiscriminately gorged on animals at a rate scarcely imaginable to modern appetites. Or does it? Newton certainly served his guests meat (they said so), and the other members of his household no doubt did not expect to go without.¹³ But since Newton ate separately from his family, there is no guarantee that he ate these groceries himself, even if it seems probable.

      Some saw a suspicious correlation between Newton’s dietary habits and his renowned sympathy for animals. ‘He had such a meekness & sweetness of temper,’ wrote John Conduitt, ‘that a melancholy story would often draw tears from him & he was exceedingly shocked at any sort of cruelty to man or beast, mercy to both being, the topick he loved to dwell upon’.¹⁴ In the notebook Conduitt kept about Newton, there is one barely legible page that records both that ‘He preferred’ (or ‘pursued’?) to ‘live on vegetables’ and that he could ‘not bear sports that kill beasts – as hunting & shooting’.¹⁵ Reading between the lines, it seems that Conduitt believed Newton preferred not to eat the objects of his pity.

      It is to Voltaire – who did more than anyone to popularise Newton’s philosophy in the decades following his death – that we owe the story of the falling apples. (Voltaire himself learned it from Catherine Conduitt, and the inspirational apple tree was visited as a shrine until it blew down in 1820.) The universe was bound together by one physical law, and, according to Voltaire, Newton believed that people were bound together by the universal law to ‘do as you would be done unto’ – the Golden Rule which every person was able to deduce with the natural faculty of sense. Voltaire extrapolated that Newton even extended the universal disposition of compassion to beasts. ‘He acceded only with repugnance to the barbarous usage of feeding ourselves with the blood and flesh of beings similar to us,’ declared Voltaire. ‘He found it a truly awful contradiction to believe that animals feel, and to make them suffer. His morality accorded in this point with his philosophy.’¹⁶ Voltaire would have gone to almost any lengths to promote Newton as the hero of natural religion and opponent of Descartes’ ruthless theory about animals. But just how connected was Newton’s philosophy with his morality?

      In his quest to discover God’s universal laws of morality, Newton undertook a massive project of biblical and historical scholarship, which he executed with the same intellectual rigour as he did his physical experiments.¹⁷ He believed that ‘in y^e beginning’ God revealed to mankind the laws upon which they were to base their religion. Since that time, mankind had corrupted God’s original religion into all the idolatrous and superstitious cults that existed on earth. Even Moses, thought Newton, had introduced unnecessary and potentially schismatic doctrines. Christ himself had not revealed any new moral laws, and Christians had muffled the simple divine message with numerous elaborations and bodges.

      Newton’s mission – as important to him as discovering the laws of gravity – was to scrape away all these accretions and reconstruct the pure original religion. He tried to do this by comparing the world’s different religious beliefs as they were recorded in ancient texts from Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece as well as in several modern travelogues.¹⁸ Anything he found to be common to all or most cultures he took to be a remnant of mankind’s shared heritage. (Claiming that universally held beliefs were ‘innate’ had become virtually untenable in the face of John Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Like Locke, Newton did think that some ideas – such as belief in God – were common all over the world because different peoples independently used their reason to come to the same conclusions, but Newton was more interested in showing that universal laws had been inherited from a shared cultural heritage.¹⁹)

      For Newton, the history of mankind’s heritage hinged on the story of Noah. After the Flood was over, when the only surviving humans were those living in Shinar below Mount Ararat in Babylonia, God delivered to Noah a reiteration of the true religion. As Noah’s community grew and divided into numerous satellite states, this original code was spread across the world, only to be corrupted in most places beyond recognition.²⁰ Newton’s passionate desire was to lead the world back to the true source: ‘tis not to be doubted but that ye religion wch Noah propagated down to his posterity was the true religion.’²¹

      Newton completed most of his religious research in the 1680s and arranged it under the provisional title Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae, or The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. Daunted by the unorthodoxy of his own conclusions, Newton realised that it would be perilous to publish them. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689, his disbelief in the Holy Trinity would alone have been punishable by severe fines, loss of position and even death. When faced with compulsory ordination into the ‘corrupt’ Anglican Church in 1675, Newton chose disgrace and dismissal from his Trinity fellowship. His position was saved at the last minute by a special royal dispensation, but it was at the price of silence.²² Today, his theological work remains a confusion of Latin and English manuscripts scattered between the libraries of Jerusalem and Cambridge and is only now being gathered together and published online by the Newton Project. However, Newton did incorporate some of his findings into a subsequent book about his new technique of using astronomy to recalculate ancient historical events. This he left as a parting gift to the world and it was published as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended within months of his refusal to take the Anglican sacrament on his deathbed.

      From a careful study of this book and his unpublished manuscripts, it is clear that Newton felt he had discovered the fundamentals of the original religion, both its ceremonial form and its moral base. The ceremonial form of the original religion was solar. A fire was placed in the centre of a sacred space surrounded by seven flames, symbolising the sun encircled by the seven (pre-Copernican) planets. This ceremony had been designed by God to teach the first people the heliocentric mechanics of the universe, while simultaneously encouraging the worship of God through the magnificence of His creation. Newton