The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  All this would come to be seared into Isaac Newton’s soul. Humphrey Newton (no relation), his lab assistant from 1685 to 1690, gives us a glimpse of the mathematician’s work schedule.

  He rarely went to bed before 2 or 3 of the clock, sometimes not till 5 or 6 . . . especially at spring and fall of the leaf, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarce going out either night or day, he sitting up one night and I another, till he had finished his chemical experiments, in the performance of which he was most accurate, strict, exact. What his aim might be I was not able to penetrate into, but his pains, his diligence at those set times, made me think he aimed at something beyond the reach of human art and industry. . . . He would sometimes, tho’ but very seldom, look into an old moldy book which lay in his laboratory, I think it was titled Agricola de Metallic, the transmuting of metals being his chief design, for which purpose antimony was a great ingredient.11

  Was there a general drift, a guiding theme, to Newton’s alchemical experiments? David Castillejo tells us that “Newton’s work was centered around the marriage of sulphur and mercury,” with Newton adding no terminology of his own but juggling the images of different authors. Sir Isaac identified “two simple forces or sperms in nature which are fundamental to the alchemists’ work,” one being “sulfurous, solar, masculine and non-volatile,” the other being “mercurial, lunar, feminine and volatile.”12 These are the same two forces that were identified by the ancient Chinese. Joseph Needham, in his magisterial Science and Civilization in Ancient China, expresses delight at “the shui yin [mercury] and the liu huang [sulphur] of ancient Chinese alchemy coming through to the threshold of modern science” as exemplified in Newton’s works; he tells us, almost in awed tones, that, “with Newton, mercury and sulphur found one of their ultimate incarnations in what he called particles of ‘earth’ and ‘acid,’ but so penetrating was his insight that these sound almost like protons and electrons, the sub-atomic particles out of which all sorts of matter—‘one catholick matter,’ as Boyle put it—would be built by variants of their stable configurations.”13

  When we try to follow Newton’s experiments, we immediately encounter the bewildering, “riddling,” hieroglyphic, beguilingly quasi-sexual language that the vigilant foxlike young man at the Pelican bookstore would have seen if he had looked over Newton’s shoulder. We struggle to pay attention as Newton tells us he uses “the regimen or phase of Mercury” to show how “the caduceus of Mercury” is formed and then uses “the regimen of Saturn” to show how this caduceus “is fermented”—and digested with the two serpents until they die and grow black. We’re relieved to read finally that the caduceus will open other substances by “striking on them with love.”14 And so on, and so forth.

  But there are beguiling glimmers, sparks from the divine, and vast tracts of ancient history open out to us in these strange depths inhabited by creatures that seem half god and half metal.

  In the 1990s and early 2000s two American historians of science, William Newman of Indiana University and Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University (who is also a chemist), made replicas of the alchemical glassware and furnaces used in Newton’s time and used this replicated equipment to duplicate a number of Newton’s alchemical experiments. In one, they “cooked” copper and iron together in a slow fire until they obtained a purple alloy with a striated netlike surface. They called this experiment, as had Isaac Newton, the “Net”; the purple alloy was thought to be one step toward the Philosophers’ Stone.

  This experiment is intriguing because, surprisingly, it relates to a myth found in both Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Homer’s Odyssey. This is the story of how from afar the sun god Apollo showed Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, his wife Venus in bed with Mars. To punish the lovers, Vulcan made a net whose meshes were as fine as cobwebs but as strong as iron. He caught Mars and Venus in this nearly invisible net in the act of lovemaking and hung this net from the ceiling for all the Olympians to see.*5015

  How exactly does this mythological story connect with the alchemical experiment called the Net? The “William Newman Project” website explains:

  In alchemy, “Venus” usually means “copper,” Mars means “iron,” and “Vulcan” means “fire.” Hence “Venus” referred to the copper in the alloy [in the Net experiment], and “Vulcan” to the intense heat used in making it. Since the antimony regulus that is added to the copper is itself reduced from stibnite (antimony sulphide) by the addition of iron, “Mars” (iron) was thought to be present in “the Net” as well. Voilà—the whole myth becomes a recipe for “the Net.”16

  Isaac Newton believed that the alchemical recipe for the Net came first and that the myth was a corrupted form of the recipe. The great Roman poet Lucian of Samosata (AD 125–180), who wrote the first trip-to-the-moon sci-fi story, adds yet another wrinkle, remarking that this story of the Vulcan-Venus-Mars triangle, while ludicrous, wasn’t an idle fantasy, “since it must have referred to a conjunction of Mars and Venus, and it is fair to add, a conjunction in the Pleiades.”17

  This is enigmatic indeed! It begins to take on meaning when we learn that Isaac Newton believed that the myth of the Net was not only a corruption of the alchemical recipe of the Net but that the alchemical formula itself was a corruption of some far more ancient aspect of the prisca sapientia—the original, primal religion of mankind or, as Newton sometimes calls it, “astronomical theology.” (See chapter 18, “Son of Archimedes.”)

  The “Gaia” theoretician James Lovelock has presented us with the beginnings of an explanation of this enigmatic triple presence of the Net story as myth, alchemical recipe, and astronomical event—one that Isaac Newton might have found captivating. Lovelock makes the beguiling suggestion that one of the reasons man emerged as a sentient species was so our planet could remember itself.18 That primordial Earth that seeks to remember itself was aware of the great planetary movements that were taking place in the sky, and perhaps somehow felt their presence or was somehow associated in that these celestial movements caused eructations and disturbances in the Earth itself; the alchemical recipes replicate deep dynamic processes in the history of the Earth. Alchemy was the memory of of God’s most ancient activities in the world; as such, it had to be not only respected but feared. William Irwin Thompson observes in Imaginary Landscapes that, “for the mythopoeic imagination of the ancients, knowledge, and complex astronomical knowledge, was stored in images and hieroglyphs.”19 This is something that we do understand only poorly today; it seems that Isaac Newton understood it well.

  Professors Principe and Newman, who have examined scores of Newton’s alchemical notebooks, believe he was trying to produce the Philosophers’ Stone because he thought that “alchemy promised tremendous control over the natural world.”20

  That power could be used to help the world or it could be used for personal aggrandizement. Newton transcribed an ancient treatise, The Epitome of the Treatise of Health, that described an elixir of good health and immortality and also a “highest” Philosophers’ Stone, the “Angels’ Stone,” which opened out in the practitioner the power of remote viewing, of making others bow to one’s will, of foretelling the future—of being surrounded by beautiful smells!—of not having to eat, and of living as long as the patriarchs, or perhaps forever. Manuel believes this elixir held some interest for Newton: “That Newton might discover an elixir of life which would bestow immortality upon him—if not upon his fellowmen, for whom he had less concern—may be a remote motivation for his search, but one not to be wholly excluded in the light of his hypochondria and his omnipotence fantasies.21

  Newton may have known of the Taoist state of hsien, or material immortality, if not through the writings of Roger Bacon then through the learned French Jesuits who, recently established in China, were regularly communicating information about ancient Chinese philosophy to the West. Newton’s hair was turning gray when he was thirty, and when his roommate, John Wickins, remarked that this must be �
�the effect of his deep attention of mind,” Newton jocularly replied that it must be due to “the experiments he made so often with quicksilver [mercury], as if from hence he took so soon that color.”22 Newton ingested mercury daily, tasting it to check its composition for the chemical experiments he was performing. As we saw earlier, this was the same practice that great emperors of China (and many another lowly official) followed; they ingested mercury daily as an essential step to achieving material immortality. Newton gave up the practice when he went down from Cambridge to London, but he still managed to live to the age of eighty-four.

  In 1678, a blazing fire in Newton’s study destroyed many of his papers on calculus, optics, and alchemy; he had left a candle burning on his desk when he went out intending to return immediately. John Conduitt wrote that, after that, “he would never undertake that work [alchemy] again, a loss much to be regretted.”23

  Did Newton interpret this fire as a divine rebuke, sent to him because he was beginning to regard alchemy as a potential fount of personal power? The fact is that Newton had been coming more and more to believe that a certain godliness was necessary for the practice of alchemy. One of his favorite alchemists, the American George Starkey (aka Eirenius Philalethes), had published in 1658 Pyrotechny Asserted and Illustrated, in which he asserted that the “son of Pyrotechnic” [the alchemist] . . . must resolve to give himself up wholly unto it, and the prosecution of the same, next unto the service of God,” a quote that Newton excerpted.24 In old age Newton told John Conduitt: “They who search after the Philosophers’ Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life. That study [is in that way] fruitful of experiments.”25 Years before, in papers affixed to an alchemy manuscript, Newton wrote:

  For alchemy does not trade with metals as ignorant vulgars think, which error has made them distress [twist and distort] that noble science; but . . . God created handmaidens to conceive & bring forth its creatures [angels attended its practice]. . . . This philosophy is not of that kind which tends to vanity & deceit but rather to profit & to edification, inducing first the knowledge of God & secondly the way to find out true medicines in the creatures [substances created by the alchemical process]. . . . The scope is to glorify God in his wonderful works, to teach a man how to live well.26

  You had to practice the ancient art of alchemy, then, as if you were worshipping God. This was no different from Newton’s attitude toward every one of his pursuits: the scientist, in unlocking the secrets of the universe, was worshipping God, and the sole purpose of the scientist’s activities was to demonstrate God’s own activities in the world, and therefore enhance man’s belief in a ruling and benevolent deity.

  Robert Boyle (1627–1691), a wealthy Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, contributed to the foundations of modern chemistry even while he practiced alchemy passionately. Frank Manuel writes that Boyle “had a passionate belief in the transmutability of differing forms of matter by the rearrangement of their particles through the agency of fire.”27 Newton shared Boyle’s belief in the universal transmutability of matter, writing in the Principia: “Any body can be transformed into another, of whatever kind, and all the intermediate degrees of qualities can be induced in it.”28

  Newton and Boyle also shared the conviction that there were concepts of a higher and nobler nature that should not be disclosed to the world. In 1676, Boyle published in the Royal Society’s house organ Philosophical Transactions a description of an alchemical experiment in which he did not reveal the composition of the key substance, a certain “Philosophical Mercury,” which he used. In a letter to the editor of the Transactions, Newton commended Boyle for his discretion, declaring that the great alchemists of the past (the “Hermetick writers”) had also not revealed the nature of Philosophical Mercury, and their example should be followed. Newton seems to be hinting at the possibility of unleashing dangerous forces when he asserts that alchemy “may possibly be an inlet to something more noble, not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there should be any verity in the Hermetick writers.”29

  Boyle seems to have agreed. In 1678, he published anonymously in London a pamphlet, Of a Degradation of Gold Made by an Anti-Elixir: A Strange Chymical Narrative, in which he tells a “backwards” alchemy success story: gold is transmuted into an inferior substance. “Pyrophilus” (“Lover of Fire”) tells the narrator the story of a nameless traveler from an unnamed land who appeared, almost out of nowhere, just long enough to give Pyrophilus an almost microscopically small portion of a red powder and explain to him in the barest of detail how to use it in an alchemical experiment. The mysterious stranger’s visit is so brief that he doesn’t have time to tell Pyrophilus what the experiment is all about.

  The red powder is the “anti-elixir” of the pamphlet’s title; there is so little of it—a mere speck, one-tenth of a grain or one-sixty-fourth of an ounce—that Pyrophilus is afraid to verify its weight for fear of losing it in the scales. The experiment is non-repeatable; there’s only enough powder for one. Joseph Needham describes the experiment:

  The anti-elixir, the nature of which was never disclosed, was a dark red powder which could convert pure gold into a brittle silvery mass and baser materials such as yellowish-brown powder partly vitrified. The de-aurification [“de-golding”] purported to have been proved by the touchstone, cupellation and the hydrostatic balance [material produced had a lesser specific gravity than gold].30

  Pyrophilus argues forcefully that transmuting a “noble” metal into a “less noble” metal is as great a proof of the truth of alchemy as the reverse. He ends Of a Degradation of Gold Made by an Anti-Elixir: A Strange Chymical Narrative on a provocative, if disturbing, note: “I will allow the Company to believe that, as extraordinary as I perceive most of you think the Phenomena of the lately recited Experiment; yet I have not (because I must not do it) as yet acquainted you with the strangest Effect of our admirable Powder.”31

  What is this “strangest Effect”? It must have manifested in the course of the experiment, for there was no red powder left for a second experiment. Why can’t it be revealed to the reader? Apparently because no reader can be trusted to use this knowledge wisely. There is something slightly menacing about this Pyrophilan story: The power of alchemy can corrupt as much as it ennobles. And it can effect things so problematical that their nature must remain a secret.

  Boyle’s story, told anonymously, is emblematic of an uneasiness about alchemy that made its great practitioners in the seventeenth century tread warily. We’ll recall that, in chapter 2 (“The Newton Code”), we watched as Isaac Newton, Henry More, and Richard Bentley circled warily around each other as they individually vied for the hand of the muse of prophecy; each tried to win her, overpower her—penetrate to her deepest secrets! No one was afraid of her.

  But now we see the great triumvirate of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Locke (the English philosopher of “innate ideas,” who was also an earnest alchemist) not circling the muse of alchemy, or perhaps the goddess of the red earth, so much as retreating from her even as they approach her. They seem paralyzed in her presence; they are anxious to find out all they can, and then suddenly, on the point of possessing her—they stop and retire. Ambivalence controls these three great men who are capable of powerful intellectual decisiveness.

  This frustrating drama plays itself out no more vividly than around the deathbed of Robert Boyle in 1692. “Red earth was thought to be about as close to the Philosophers’ Stone as you could get,” explains Principe. “It was assumed that if you could create red earth, it would be relatively simple to get to the Philosophers’ Stone from there.”32 Newton and Locke knew Boyle had possessed some of this priceless red powder and had known how to use it. Locke was the executor of Boyle’s will. Historian David Brewster writes:

  Boyle had, before his death, communicated this process [of using the red powder, aka “red earth,” as a sort of mini Philosophers’ Stone] both to Locke and Newton, and procured some of the red
earth for his friends. Having received some of this earth from Locke, Newton tells him, that, though he has “no inclination to prosecute the process,” yet, as he had “a mind to prosecute it,” he would “be glad to assist him,” though “he feared he had lost the first and third of the process out of his pocket.” He goes on to thank Locke for “what he communicated to him out of his own notes about it,” and adds, in a postscript, that “when the hot weather is over, he intends to try the beginning (that is the first of the three parts of the recipe), though the success seems improbable.”33

  Locke sends Newton transcripts of two of Boyle’s papers, which apparently deal with how to “multiply gold” using the red earth. But Newton in his reply “dissuades Locke against incurring any expense by a too hasty trial of the recipe.” He declares that several chemists were engaged in trying the process and that Mr. Boyle, in communicating it to himself, “had reserved a part of it from my knowledge, though I knew more of it than he has told me.” David Brewster continues: “In ‘offering his secret’ to Newton and Locke, he [Boyle] imposed conditions upon them, while, in the case of Newton at least, he did not perform his own part in the arrangement. On another occasion, when he communicated two experiments in return for one, ‘he cumbered them,’ says Newton, ‘with such circumstances as startled me, and made me afraid of any more.’”34