The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  A little fellow. He is paile. There is noe roome for mee to sit. What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for? He is broken. The ship sinketh. There is a thing which trobeleth mee. He should have been punished. No man understands mee. What will become of me. I will make an end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to doe.

  These are remarkable sentences for a youth to choose for Latin exercises, indeed, the selection is almost unbelievable. "In all these youthful scribblings," writes Manuel,

  there is an astonishing absence of positive feeling. The word love never appears, and expressions of gladness and desire are rare. . . . Almost all the statements are negations, admonitions, prohibitions. The climate of life is hostile and punitive.

  Had history heard nothing more from Isaac Newton, these notebook entries would amount to nothing more than a psychiatric curiosity. But we are talking about the creator of the modern scientific outlook, and that outlook, the insistence that everything be totally predictable and rationally calculable ("kill anything that moves," as Philip Slater puts it) cannot be separated from its pathological basis. "A chief souce of Newton's desire to know," writes Manuel, "was his anxiety before and his fear of the unknown." "Knowledge that could be mathematicized ended his quandaries . . . [The fact] that the world obeyed mathematical law was his security."

  To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid, tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man. And with rare exceptions, his fantasy wish was fulfilled during the course of his lifetime. The system was complete in both its physical and historical dimensions. A structuring of the world in so absolutist a manner that every event, the closest and the most remote, fits nearly into an imaginary system has been called a symptom of illness, especially when others refuse to join in the grand obsessive design. It was Newton's fortune that a large portion of his total system was acceptable to European society as a perfect representation of reality, and his name was attached to the age.5

  The schizophrenic, wrote the anthropologist Géza Róheim, is the magician who has failed.6 Despite his eventual nervous breakdown, Newton was no psychotic; but that he bordered on a type of madness, and allayed it with a totally death-oriented view of nature, is beyond doubt. What is significant, however, is not his view of nature itself, but the broad agreement that it found, the excitement that it generated. Newton was the magician who succeeded. Instead of remaining some sort of isolated crank, he was able to get all of Europe "to join in the grand obsessive design," becoming president of the Royal Sodely and being buried, in 1727, amidst pomp and glory in Westminster Abbey in what was literally an international event. With the acceptance of the Newtonian world view, it might be argued, Europe went collectively out of its mind.

  Where does Newton's Hermeticism fit into all of this? We have already seen that he regarded himself as the inheritor of an archaic tradition, what D.P. Walker has called the 'prisca theologia' (ancient theology), a collection of church-related texts believed, during the Renaissance, to have been inspired by knowledge that dated back to the time of Moses and which embodied the secrets of matter and the universe.7 Newton's alchemical library was indeed large, and his alchemical experiments were a major feature of his life down to 1696 when he moved to London to become master of the Mint. Newton was connected to alchemy by something that was integrally related to his megalomania about inheriting the sacred tradition: his conviction that matter was not inert but required an active, or hylarchic, principle for its motion. In aIchemy Newton hoped to find the microcosmic correlate to gravitational attraction, which he had already established on the macrocosmic level. As Gregory Bateson has rightly remarked, Newton did not discover gravity; he invented it.8 This invention, however, was part of a much larger quest: Newton's search for the system of the world, the secret of the universe -- an ancient riddle stretching back, as Keynes said, to the Babylonians. The Hermetic tradition was thus the framework of early Newtonian thought, and gravity merely a name for the hylarchic principle that he was certain had to exist.9 Newton was first and foremost the alchemist Keynes saw in him, then. Over the years, however, as the result of a self-repression that had an important political motivation behind it, he gradually evolved into a mechanical philosopher.

  English interest in alchemy, and mysticism in general, became intense during the period of Newton's childhood, the Civil War and after. More alchemical and astrological texts were translated into English during 1650-60 than in the entire preceding century.10 The reasons for this increased interest were largely political. Even today, one's view of matter and force is inevitably a religious question; and in the context of the seventeenth century, religious questions were typically political issues as well. At one level, the Civil War signified the breakdown of a feudal economy; the opposition of the new bourgeoisie, with its laissez-faire outlook, to the monopolistic practices of the crown. This economic struggle was reflected politically in the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and religiously in the triumph of Puritanism. But the war had another dimension, now recovered in the work of Christopher Hill: the attempt, on the part of a vast number of sects, to fight the crown, and later the Parliamentarians, with the ideology of communism, or what Engels called utopian socialism, and to argue for direct knowledge of God as opposed to salvation either through works or blind faith.11 The religion of these numerous groups -- Levellers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Familists, Behmenists, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, Seekers -- was in many cases some combination of Hermeticism, Paracelsism, or soteriological alchemy, and hence they were often linked in the public mind with what was called "enthusiasm," that is, immoderation in religious beliefs, including possession by God or prophetic frenzy. All mystical experiences, naturally enough, came under this heading, and many of the radicals had clearly had such ecstatic insights.12 It was among the mystical sects," writes Keith Thomas, "that alchemy struck some of its deepest roots."13 While there have been no studies demonstrating the actual extent of such beliefs among the lower classes and radical groups, there is little problem in demonstrating that such an association was made in the public (especially middle-class) mind of the time. At the center of these beliefs was a view of nature directly opposed to the new science: the notion that God was present in everything, that matter was alive (pantheism); that change occurred via internal conflict (dialectical reason) rather than rearrangement of parts; and that -- in contrast to the hierarchical views of the Church of England -- any individual could attain enlightenment and have direct experience of the Godhead (soteriological alchemy). The attempt of the lower classes to hang onto Hermetic notions reflected the class split described by Keith Thomas, who observed that the Protestant/rationalist attack on magic left the middle class with secular salvation, and the lower classes (in a context of enclosures and accelerating poverty) with nothing. During this period, then, Hermeticism had an unmistakably socialist edge.14

  The political threat inherent in the occult world view, however, went far beyond the attack on property and privilege espoused by most of these radical sects. It included: outright atheism; rejection of monogamy and an affirmation of the pleasures of the body; demands for religious toleration, as well as for the abolition of the tithe and the state church; contempt for the regular clergy; and rejection of any notions of hierarchy, as well as of the concept of sin. The ties between occult and revolutionary thought can be seen in a whole spectrum of leading radicals, but, as already noted, the popular impression that communism, libertinism, heresy, and Hermeticism were part of some vast conspiracy is amply documented in the numerous statements made on the subject by clergymen.15 This intense political/occult ferment, and the fear of it, received full expression in the 1640s. In the 1650s, however, the tide began to turn; and after the Restoration, the mechanical philosophy was seen by the ruling elites as the sober antidote to the enthusiasm of the last two decades. From 1655 onward there was a series of conversions to the
mechanical philosophy by men who had previously been sympathetic to alchemy.

  These conversions were thus part of the reaction against enthusiasm on the part of the propertied classes and leading members of the Church of England, groups that coalesced in the Royal society itself. Thomas Sprat, in the earliest history of the Society (1667), viewed the mechanical philosophy as helping to instill respect for law and order, and claimed that it was the job of science and the Royal Society to oppose enthusiasm. Men like Charleton and Boyle, key figures in the conversion to mechanism, worried about the influence of an alchemist like Jacob Boehme among English radicals. They feared that the proliferation of religions based on mystical insight or individual conscience would end in no religion at all. "Elevation of the mechanical philosophy above the dialectical science of radical 'enthusiasts,'" writes Christopher Hill, "reciprocally helped to undermine such beliefs.16

  As the reader might imagine, Newton, who had his most brilliant insights regarding the system of the world in 1666, was in something of a quandary. It must have been as evident to him as to any student at Restoration Cambridge, writes Kubrin, "that Hermetic knowledge was widely viewed by his contemporaries as an inducement to enthusiasm, and that extreme caution should be exercised with regard to such ideas." At the same time, he saw himself as the inheritor of the sacred tradition, and was convinced that the answer to the riddle of the system of the world was buried within it. What Newton did, then, was to delve deeply into the Hermetic wisdom for his answers, while clothing them in the idiom of the mechanical philosophy.

  The centerpiece of the Newtonian system, gravitational attraction, was in fact the Hermetic principle of sympathetic forces, which Newton saw as a creative principle, a source of divine energy in the universe. Although he presented this idea in mechanical terms, his unpublished writings reveal his commitment to the cornerstone of all occult systems: the notion that mind exists in matter and can control it (original participation). In his letter to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, cited in the epigraph to this chapter, Newton states that "nature is a perpetual circulatory worker," and then offers a description of nature's mode of operation -- separating the gross from the subtle, the volatile from the fixed, and so on -- which is alchemy pure and simple. Draft versions of published work contain statements that were not publicly heard in the West, in the modern period, until Lamarck and Blake: "all matter duly formed is attended with signes of life"; "nature delights in transformations"; the world is "God's sensorium," and so on. His writings abound with alchemical notions, such as fermentation and putrefaction, or the "sociableness" and "unsociableness" of various substances for each other; and some of these statements even made their way into the famous 31st Query of the "Opticks."17 As R.S. Westfall puts it, alchemy was Newton's most enduring passion, and the "Principia" something of an interruption of this larger quest.18

  Even some of Newton's published work (like the 31st Query) reveals his intense interest in the occult. The reader may be surprised to learn that Newton wrote on the ancient temple of King Solomon, and speculated on the size of that ancient measure, the cubit.19 The notion that the secrets of the universe were contained in the mathematical relationships built into the structure of ancient holy buildings was a part of the Hermetic tradition, one that is making something of a comeback with the current vogue of "pyramid power." Indeed, Newton had a similar interest in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and as with his attempt to use alchemical experiments to validate the theory of gravity, this interest was much more than an unrelated hobby. Newton was later to state that Egyptian priests knew the very secrets of the cosmos which he had revealed in the "Principia."

  Newton's retreat from these views, as Kubrin is able to show, occurred in the context of a revival of Hermetic ideas in the late 1670s and the 1680s, the years leading up to the Glorious Revolution.20 Leveller and republican sentiments emerged once again, and a leading proponent of the new Hermeticism, especially in the 1690s, was one John Toland, who had studied with the Newtonian scholar David Gregory. Toland saw the animistic notions lurking in Newton's work and pointed to them in his own publications, claiming that nature was transformative and infinitely fecund, and drawing an analogy to the polifical arena. Newton's dilemma was that he secretly agreed with Toland's theory of matter and force, and had in fact held these views for decades. It thus became imperative for him to dissociate himself from these ideas; but this necessarily meant changing his mind about them in what amounted to a rigorous self-censorship. His disciple Samuel Clarke was entrusted with the job of attacking Toland in a set of sermons published in 1704, and when Clarke translated the "Opticks" into Latin two years later, the phrase, the world is "God's sensorium," was altered to read, is "like God's sensorium."21 Statements such as "we cannot say that all Nature is not alive" were withdrawn before publications went to press; and most importantly, Newton adopted the position that matter was inert, that it changed not dialectically (i.e., internally) but through rearrangement alone. Thus in the quotation from the "Opticks" cited at the beginning of this chapter, Newton gives as his purpose "that nature may be lasting"; in other words, that it may be stable, predictable, regular -- like the social order ought to be. As a young man, Newton had been fascinated by the fecundity of nature. Now, its alleged rigidity was somehow all-important.

  In the modern empirical sense, there was nothing "scientific" about this shift from Hermeticism to mechanism. The change was not the result of a series of careful experiments on the nature of matter, and indeed, it is no more difficult to visualize the earth as a living organism than it is to see it as a dead, mechanical object.22 And at the risk of stretching a point somewhat, it seems to me, following Kubrin's argument, that two things must be noted about this transformation, in addition to its nonscientific character. First, the forces that triumphed in the second half of the seventeenth century were those of bourgeois ideology and laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the idea of living matter heresy to such groups; it was also economically inconvenient. A dead earth ruptures the delicate ecological balance that was maintained in the alchemical tradition, but if nature is dead, there are no restraints on exploiting it for profit. Loving cultivation becomes rape; and that, to me, is most clearly what industrial society in general (not just capitalism) represents. That the current breakdown of such societies, at least in the West, is being accompanied by an occult revival, with all its good and bad aspects, is hardly surprising.

  Second, the triumph of the Puritan view of life, which concomitantly repressed sexual energy and sublimated it into brutalizing labor,23 helped to create the "modal personality" of our time -- a personality that is docile and sub- dued in the face' of authority, but fiercely aggressive toward competitors and subordinates. The severely repressed Newton, as Blake pointed out, was everyman; and various paintings of Newton done over the period 1689 to 1726 (Plates 12-15) reveal an increasing amount of what Wilhelm Reich brilliantly termed "character armor." In the earliest painting, the "Hermetic" Newton retains (despite his childhood) a gentle, ethereal quality that the artist has captured quite beautifully. In the end, however, we see the rigidity of the mechanical world view, the Newton who denied his own internal principles -- what Rilke called the "unlived lines in our bodies"24 -- or the sake of social approval and outward conformity. We see, in effect, the tragedy of modern man.25

  Plate 12. Isaac Newton, 1689. Portrait by Godfrey Kneller. Lord Portsmouth

  and the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estate.

  Plate 13. Isaac Newton, 1702. Portrait by Godfrey Kneller. Courtesy,

  National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Plate 14. Isaac Newton, ca. 1710. Portrait by James Thornhill.

  By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Plate 15. Isaac Newton, 1726, the year before his death. Mezzotint by

  John Faber, after painting by John Vanderbank. Courtesy, Prints Division,

  The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
s.

  Finally, as a number of writers have pointed out; just as the lower classes were suppressed at the level of work and labor, so did the middle and upper classes keep themselves in check at the level of literary and intellectual activity. The attack on enthusiasm was breathtakingly successful, and is reflected in the poetry of the eighteenth century (the carefully contrived couplets of Dryden and Pope) as well as the notion of classical scholarship itselt. "The classics!" cried Blake. "It is the classics, and not Goths nor monks, that desolate Europe with wars."26 In his painting of Newton, carving up the world with a compass (Plate 16), Blake tried to show the blindness of this orientation to nature; and nowhere did he say it better than in his verse letter to Thomas Butts (1802):

  Now I a fourfold vision see,

  And a fourfold vision is given to me;

  'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight