Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White

the neurotic, the obsessive, driven mystic, began to emerge only in 1936, when a collection of Newton’s papers, considered to be of ‘no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, was purchased at Sotheby’s by the distinguished economist and Newton scholar John Maynard Keynes. (He bequeathed it to King’s College, Cambridge, when he died ten years later.)

      After studying the contents of Newton’s secret papers – those documents, manuscripts and notebooks ignored by the hagiographers – in 1942 Keynes delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in which he portrayed an altogether different and highly controversial image of history’s most renowned and exalted scientist:

      In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.⁵

      Keynes was obviously enthralled by what he had discovered, and, fortunately for us, he lived in an age that could accept such findings. What he found raised two linked questions about Newton. First, if the creator of modern mechanical theory had spent the majority of his time involved with alchemical experiments, what else might be hidden about him? Second, did Newton’s work in alchemy influence his purely scientific work?

      The first of these problems was relatively easy to answer. Newton was known to have been a difficult man, a man who had been damaged emotionally by childhood trauma, a supreme egotist who had been involved in well-publicised battles with a number of contemporaries. But, before Keynes’s revelation, biographers had barely alluded to these facts. Until 1936, most Newton biographers were content to rely upon the opinions of William Stukeley. Only gradually did others begin to question the old authorities and to dig a little deeper.

      What has been unearthed does not always paint a pretty picture. The reality of human character rarely does. However, the newly revealed Newton, the broader-canvas Newton, is a human Newton – a man whom we should be proud to accept for his peculiarities and failings as we are for his unique skills and talents. As Sir Christopher Wren, his contemporary, put it, ‘Neither need we fear to diminish a miracle by explaining it.’⁶

      What has been gradually revealed is the image of a genius who sought knowledge in everything he came across, a man who was driven to investigate all facets of life he encountered, everything that puzzled him. Such voraciousness drove him to self-inflicted injury, nervous breakdown, to a state in which he almost lost his mind, and possibly even to occult practices and the black arts. But the work that emerged from these explorations changed the world.

      The other major question provoked by the Keynes papers – whether or not there was cross-fertilisation between Newton’s alchemical studies and his scientific researches – was a much more difficult problem to address and remains a question that is far from being resolved completely.

      Not least of the problems facing any serious research into what Newton was doing is the fact that he left behind over a million words on the subject of alchemy. Beyond that has lain the problem of deciphering such a mass of material written largely in code, in Latin and in Newton’s tiny handwriting. The task has occupied scholars for sixty years and is ongoing. The late American scholar Betty Jo Dobbs produced a vast body of work providing a detailed analysis of Newton’s alchemical experiments gathered together in two academic works, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (1975) and The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (1991). Others have begun to analyse Newton’s vast collection of writings on biblical prophecy and his ideas on a range of subjects from astrology to numerology.⁷ But for the lay reader there remains the added difficulty of understanding the mental processes behind seventeenth-century alchemy. It is not easy to empathise with a mentality that is, on so many levels, quite alien to the late-twentieth-century mind.

      In the following pages I will discuss both sides of the argument, for and against alchemical influence upon Newton’s scientific work. But, based upon the evidence available, my conclusion is unequivocal: the influence of Newton’s researches in alchemy was the key to his world-changing discoveries in science. His alchemical work and his science were inextricably linked.

      Newton himself said, ‘A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.’⁸ The no man’s land between imagining and understanding is, at times, the natural home of the biographer; but by demythologising truths that have long been veiled in secrecy this no man’s land becomes narrower. Newton the towering intellect, the pioneer and father of modern science, can now stand alongside Newton the mystic, the emotionally desiccated obsessive and the self-proclaimed, but deluded, discoverer of the philosophers’ stone – divested but undiminished.

       Chapter 1 Desertion

      Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hide in Night.God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.

      ALEXANDER POPE¹

      In the days before the English Civil War, Woolsthorpe was a peaceful Lincolnshire village, and even when, for a time, the world seemed turned upside down by internecine struggle the village survived the traumas almost unscathed. A few hundred yards beyond the village, up on the Great North Road (today the A1), the soldiers of the King and those of Parliament clanked their way towards cannon blast and bloody death during the bleak winter of 1642–3; but few men from the village became embroiled in the fighting, and the nearest battles were several miles away.

      Woolsthorpe (or Wulsthorpe as it was once known) is an ancient settlement, nestled in a hollow on the west side of the river Witham, about seven miles from the nearest sizeable town, Grantham. Newton’s first biographer, William Stukeley, described the village as having a good prospect eastwards, with a view of the Roman road and the Hermen-Street going over the fields to the east of Colsterworth: ‘There can be no finer country than this,’ he declared.²

      During the seventeenth century, Woolsthorpe was little more than a collection of small farms and humble country dwellings clustered around the manor house. The area offered poor opportunities as arable land and would sustain only a two-field rotation, which meant that fields were left fallow half the time, so the locals eked out a frugal existence largely from sheep farming.

      The Newtons, of which there were many scattered around the Grantham region, had for several generations before Isaac’s birth been viewed as being one cut above the local populace, existing on the social cusp between yeomen and lower gentry.^* This was all thanks to Isaac’s great-great-grandfather, one John Newton, of the nearby village of Westby, who, according to community records and evidence pieced together from wills and tax demands, managed miraculously to ascend the social order from peasant to yeoman during his lifetime.⁴ In fact John Newton of Westby did so well that he was able to leave substantial inheritances and dowries for his children – including, for his son Richard, sixty acres of some of the best land of the area, situated in the village of Woolsthorpe, bought shortly before the old man’s death in 1562.

      John