Isaac Newton: the last magician

Isaac Newton, like Albert Einstein, is a quintessential symbol of the human intellect and its ability to decode the secrets of nature. 

His fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colours, and the formulation of the calculus.

Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some 30 years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues.

In 1936, the world of Isaac Newton scholarship received a rude shock. 

In that year the venerable auction house of Sotheby's released a catalogue describing 329 lots of Newton's manuscripts, mostly in his own handwriting, of which over a third were filled with content that was undeniably alchemical. 

These manuscripts, which had been labelled "not fit to be printed" upon Newton's death in 1727, raised a host of interesting questions in 1936 as they do even today. Was the founder of classical physics an alchemist? And if so, what does this mean? 

A large number of these manuscripts were purchased by the economist, John Maynard Keynes, who devoted a number of years to unveiling their secrets. 

In a famous article, Keynes claimed 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.

Did Newton pursue his alchemical interests for scientific reasons, or simply because he was swept up by the old dream of transmuting base metals into gold? 

Did Newton discover a secret theological meaning in alchemical texts, which often describe the transmutational secret as a special gift revealed by God to his chosen sons? Or was Newton perhaps attracted to the graphic and mysterious imagery of alchemy, with its illustrations of hermaphrodites, couples copulating within flasks, poisonous dragons, green lions, and dying toads? 

None of these questions is made easier by the fact that Newton's laboratory notebooks, even the one containing the first full description of his brilliant discovery that white light is really a mixture of immutable spectral colours, are filled with recipes patently elaborated from the very alchemical sources that overflow the manuscripts sold by Sotheby's in 1936. 

Here too, alongside sober explanations of optical and physical phenomena such as freezing and boiling, we find ‘Neptune's Trident’, ‘Mercury's Caducean Rod’, and of course the ‘Green Lyon,’ all symbolizing substances derived from Newton's alchemical readings. Whatever the ultimate purpose of Newton's alchemical investigations may have been, it is clear that we cannot erect a watertight dam separating them from his other scientific endeavours.

Recent work in the history of science has shown that alchemy was synonymous with ‘chymistry’ in the early modern period. Chymistry included three basic domains. First, chymists laid claim to a large group of technologies ranging from the making of pigments and dyes and the manufacture of mineral acids to the distillation of ‘strong waters’ for drink. 

While often supporting themselves by making these items of commerce, however, chymical practitioners were also at the forefront of early modern pharmacology, having placed a radically new emphasis on mineral-based drugs and an equally important stress on the use of laboratory technologies such as distillation and sublimation in their production. Chymical medicine, or iatrochemistry, was one of the important new fields of early modern science, and the second basic division of the discipline. Third and finally, the attempt to make gold from less precious materials, often referred to by the Greek term chrysopoeia, remained a seemingly viable research project for many 17th century chymists.

Newton was involved in all three of chymistry's major branches in varying degrees, and we make no attempt to impose an anachronistic division of the discipline into modern categories. It is important, rather, to see how chemical technology and medicine were connected to Newton's involvement with the ‘Great Work’, just as it is important to see how his chymistry was related to his other intellectual and technical pursuits.

www.shaps.unimelb.edu.au/history-philosophy-science