The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Locke’s letter also suggests that at this time a company had been established in London to multiply gold with this recipe. Brewster resumes:

  Although Boyle possessed the golden recipe for twenty years, yet Newton could not find that he had “either tried it himself, or got it tried successfully by any body else; for,” he says, “when I spoke doubtingly about it, he confessed that he had not seen it tried, but added, that a certain gentleman was now about it, and it succeeded very well so far as he had gone, and that all the signs appeared, so that I needed not doubt of it.”35

  The reader may by now have had his or her fill of the extraordinarily neurotic behavior of these three natural philosophers who were otherwise capable of extraordinary intellectual achievements. Did they simply not want to admit to each other or to themselves that they were beginning to feel that alchemy might not be a substantive pursuit? Such a conclusion seems to be belied by the mysterious success of the Pyrophilan experiment as described anonymously by Boyle and Newton’s conviction that alchemy contained enormous potential power, the dangers surrounding which sometimes made the pursuit of the secrets of alchemy almost not worth the effort.

  In the unread 80 percent of Newton’s one million words about alchemy housed in the university library at Cambridge, it is likely there are answers to these questions.

  Newton’s numerous nonscientific, even “occult,” endeavors may have helped open his mind to some of his most original ideas.36

  “I think that his early optical theories owed a debt to alchemy,” writes William Newman. Newman believes Newton’s alchemical experiments in which he deconstructed and reconstructed compounds suggested to him the idea of using prisms to separate sunlight into a rainbow spectrum, then recombine those colors to form white light again.37

  In Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, Michael White argues that Newton’s lifelong efforts to purify the metal antimony with iron to produce the “Star Regulus of Antimony” may have helped him conceive the idea of a gravitational force. White says that this specific regulus “does look like a star, and its radiating shard-like crystals may be imagined as lines of light radiating from a starlike center. But the crystal may just as easily be visualized as representing shards or lines of light pointing inwards—a star at the center with lines of light, or force, traveling towards its center.”38

  It may be that Newton looked beyond light and gravity to try to open up the possibility of total human transformation with his alchemical experiments. The question with which he began, that August day in London in 1669 when he first entered William Cooper’s Pelican, was, How could the vegetative spirit (which he later came to call the active alchemical principle) enter mechanical matter in such a way as to imbue it with the divine spark of life? Dobbs summarizes the question he ultimately sought to answer, even in the last days of his life: “Will the rediscovery of the pure, potent fire that is the ultimate secret of the active alchemical principle lead to the restoration of true religion and the ushering in of the millennium?”39

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MASTERS OF THE PRISCA SAPIENTIA, PART 1

  Aristarchus, Anaxagoras, Numa Pompilius

  In 1922, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence made an astonishing assertion about the prehistory of the world. He wrote:

  I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our era, once had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

  I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different in constitution and nature from our science once was universal, established all over the existing globe. I believe it was esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow today, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, Atlantis, and Europe.

  . . . In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is today.

  Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The refugees from the drowned continent fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and self-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.1

  It would be a vast exaggeration to say that the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century subscribed to D. H. Lawrence’s description. But certainly a good many of them believed that the first peoples of the world possessed a perfected body of knowledge that the men of the Renaissance called the prisca sapientia, or “pristine wisdom.”*51 They believed this body of knowledge had become corrupted as the centuries progressed but that Noah had been able to bring bits and pieces of it through the flood to the new world.

  No comprehensive picture of this “land of the prisca sapientia” has come down to us. But, here and there in classical literature, we sometimes get tantalizing hints of a reality—or perhaps they are only ancient myths, figments of the archaic mind—aglow with more knowledge and power than our own. The church father Origen quotes the Jewish historian Josephus as asserting that “the constellations were known long before the days of the patriarchs by Noah, Enoch, Seth, and Adam—indeed, were mentioned in the Book of Enoch as ‘already named and divided.’” This knowledge was acquired not with telescopes, but through longevity, which, Josephus declares, “was a blessing specially bestowed to give opportunity for a long-continued period of observation and comparison of the heavenly bodies.”2

  The thirteenth-century English Franciscan philosopher and proto-experimental scientist Roger Bacon believed the first men and women in the world acquired longevity through alchemical practices carried through to perfection. He quoted ancient sources of alchemical lore to the effect that there are four levels of the Philosophers’ Stone and that those who attained to the highest level—the “Angels’ Stone”—were constantly surrounded by beautiful odors, didn’t have to eat, could foretell the future, and could live to a very great age. Did the first men and women in the world function at the fourth level of the Philosophers’ Stone?

  For most of us today, all this is mere fancifulness; we don’t believe there ever was a “land of the prisca sapienta.” Ages not much earlier than our own believed differently. In a lecture he gave shortly after Isaac Newton’s death, Lord Francis Atterbury, dean of Westminster, declared that the great mathematician believed the ancients were “men of genius and superior intelligence who had carried their discoveries in every field much further than we today suspect, judging from what remains of their writings. More ancient writings have been lost than have been preserved, and perhaps our new discoveries are of less value than those that we have lost.”3

  Isaac Newton pushed a belief in the superiority of the thinkers of high antiquity to the furthest extreme: he claimed they had known all about the atomic structure of the universe and that the Greek seer Pythagoras had anticipated his own law of universal gravitation, veiling it in the legend of the music of the spheres.

  During the final decade of the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac began to gingerly feel out his colleagues as to what they thought about these extraordinary claims. He was likely the power behind the letter his brilliant protégé Nicolas Fatio de D
uillier sent on February 5, 1692, to Europe’s greatest scientist after Newton, the Dutch natural philosopher and mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695).

  The gregarious and voluble Fatio had multiple contacts. He flitted like a brilliantly colored hummingbird from drawing room to drawing room of the scientific elite of Europe, as learned and gifted as any of them, but with an emotional vulnerability that eventually proved his undoing. Fifteen years later, the French Prophets, a Protestant sect whose members channeled the Holy Ghost while trembling and fainting, won his heart and soul; Fatio never broke free of the attachment and ended up a broken old man dabbling in new kinds of watches and a history of apple growing. In 1692, though, Fatio was Newton’s presumed successor and his most trusted friend, and he wrote in his letter to Huygens:

  M. Newton believes he has discovered quite clearly that the Ancients, such as Pythagoras, Plato, etc., had provided all the demonstrations he provides of the true System of the World, which is based on the principle of a Gravity whose force diminishes in inverse proportion to the square of the increasing distance. The ancients made this knowledge into a great mystery. But fragments of it remain, and it appears, he [Newton] says, that if these fragments are put together then in effect they express the same ideas as he sets forth in the Principia Mathematica.4

  Huygens was a late Renaissance genius who discovered the rings of Saturn, invented the pendulum clock, and composed a revolutionary treatise on optics. In 1692 he wrote a proto-science-fiction novel, Cosmotheoros (The Celestial Worlds Discover’ d), in which the narrator tours the solar system and discusses the music of the celestial worlds with extraterrestrials. Few minds were as brilliant and open as Huygens’s, but his reply to Fatio was dismissive: the ancients had knowledge of some general principles, he wrote, but they were not capable of grasping the details of the new science that Isaac Newton had invented.

  The amiable and able mathematician-astronomer David Gregory (1659–1708), Newton’s Scots disciple, was often unctuous and ingratiating in Newton’s presence but fully appreciated the achievements of the world’s greatest mathematician. In May 1694, Gregory traveled to Cambridge from Edinburgh to burn some incense at the great man’s altar and pry as much information out of him as he could. Gregory was there for a month. Newton was unusually forthcoming; the Scotsman filled several notebooks, recording in one that Newton intended to

  spread [stretch] himself in exhibiting the agreement of his own findings with that of the ancients and principally with that of Thales, the legendary founder of Greek philosophy. He would demonstrate that what Epicurus and Lucretius had affirmed [about the atomic structure of matter] was true and valid, and that the charge of atheism laid on them was unjust . . . [that] Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, had been “a believer in the Copernican system,” while Pythagoras and Plato had “observed the gravitation of all bodies towards all.”5

  Gregory accepted Newton’s assertions with few reservations. In 1702, he incorporated most of the mathematician’s classical references into the preface of his leading-edge Newtonian textbook Elementa astronomiae physicae et Geometriae (Elements of Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy).6

  Newton slipped some of his early observations on the subject into the “classical” draft scholia he had intended to add to the second edition of the Principia, then thought better of it and withdrew them. These remarks eventually found their way into his posthumously published De Mundi Systemate (The System of the World) of 1728 (see appendix E).

  It seems strange that the proud and pricklish Isaac Newton, who harassed Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz to their graves for daring to suggest that they had anticipated him in the discovery of the law of gravitation and of calculus, respectively, would be willing to suggest that anyone at all, even the supreme geniuses of the ancient world, had anticipated his discoveries. Edward Dolnick remarks:

  The notion is both surprising and poignant. Isaac Newton was not only the supreme genius of modern times but also a man so jealous and bad-tempered that he exploded in fury at anyone who dared question him. He refused to speak to his rivals; he deleted all references to them from his published works; he hurled abuse at them even after their deaths. . . . But here was Newton arguing vehemently that his boldest insights had all been known thousands of years before his birth.7

  Scholars J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi suggest that Newton’s textual analyses of ancient natural philosophy may have served to “provide a pedigree for his own doctrines, to legitimate them for an audience which still widely accepted the idea of a prisca sapientia. He could use them as a direct defense for his own doctrines, as he does in the Opticks, and, on one occasion, during the controversy with Leibniz [over who first invented calculus].”8

  Newton found it particularly difficult to defend his idea that gravity could act over a distance because of the presence of God; but he could point to many instances where the seers of high antiquity, discussing in veiled, symbolical form what Newton was sure was gravity, credited its existence entirely to God.

  One of the first “masters of the prisca sapientia,” so to speak, that Newton engaged with was the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 319–230 BC), who, seventeen hundred years before Copernicus, published a brief work demonstrating mathematically that the Earth went around the sun.

  Newton may also have wanted to remind his colleagues that the scientists of antiquity had suffered as much from the censure of religious authorities as had, in his own time, Giordano Bruno and Galileo (and potentially Isaac Newton himself). If Newton was in any kind of conflict with the church, it simply came with the territory of introducing revolutionary ideas into the world.

  Though Newton could not possibly have put it in these terms—modern psychology was only invented, in his own time, by his friend John Locke—we sometimes wonder if, in alluding to the realm of the prisca sapientia, he is not alluding to an expanded state of consciousness. William Blake saw man as devolving down through successive states of consciousness. Did Newton, on an intuitive level, see mankind in somewhat the same way?

  For Blake, we moderns are merely shrunken versions of our true selves; but, by using our imaginations, which are part of the mind of God, we can return to a higher state; we can expand our beings infinitely. The fall of man was the partial fall of God along with the fall of man, a fall from a state of perfection down through seven stages during which we contracted and fragmented and shriveled. In the earliest ages, the consciousnesses of men and women were much more fully expanded. In talking about this descent through seven stages, couldn’t you just as well be talking about the progressive corruption of the prisca sapientia?

  Was it the expanded consciousness of higher beings that Newton intuited when he connected the great sages of antiquity with the idea of a prisca sapientia?

  Let’s take a close look at three eminent figures of ancient times whom Newton held in high esteem because of the revelatory nature of their achievements—revelatory because they seemed to reveal a portion of the wisdom of the prisca sapientia, the eternal wisdom that Newton himself thought he was restoring.

  Let’s start by spending a night with Aristarchus of Samos, mentioned above. And let’s assume that the shade of Newton, having torn himself away from the ravishing sight of the planet Saturn, has come along for the ride.

  When Nicholas Copernicus’s (1473–1543) On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which demonstrated the heliocentric nature of the universe, was first published, just a few months before he died, it failed to include a manuscript remark that would have turned the Inquisition violently against the brilliant Polish astronomer. This was Copernicus’s observation that “the mobility of the earth [its motion, specifically around the sun] . . . was the opinion of Aristarchus of Samos.” This was Copernicus’s only reference to the man about whom historian of science J. L. E. Dreyer writes: “When we consider that seventeen hundred years were to elapse before the orbital motion of the earth was again taught by anybody, we cannot help wondering
how Aristarchus can have been led to so daring and lofty and idea.”9

  Newton thought he knew how. He believed there lingered in the great Greek astronomer some of the power of the prisca sapientia.

  Let’s descend upon a high sloping hill on the outskirts of Athens some time in 240 BC. It’s midnight. The sky is clear. The stars gleam like diamonds; the moon is full. All across the hill, groves of fig trees alternate with luxuriant vineyards.

  A gray-bearded old man with a lantern is hurrying between the groves and the vineyards. This is Aristarchus of Samos. He owns this hill, not in the sense that he has purchased it and is its proprietor, but creatively, intellectually, in the sense that he has invested huge quantities of his intellectual and creative capital in it. Aristarchus has increased the yield of the fig trees by placing male branches on female branches to make it easier for the gall wasps to do their work of pollenization. He has facilitated the growth of the grapes by introducing wild asses ito gnaw excess twigs off the vines.10 In a cleared space between a vineyard and a fig orchard, he has placed a tall, hemispherical, stone sundial, the scaphe, which he invented himself and which is the most advanced of the day.

  Indeed, Aristarchus of Samos is the Leonardo da Vinci of his day, and the first-century BC Roman military engineer and architect Vitruvius will include him among “the few great men who possessed an equally profound knowledge of all branches of science, geometry, astronomy, music, &c.”11 He does not own the sky glittering with stars above the mountaintop, but he has pushed its boundaries farther away: in a book called On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, Aristarchus has used an arcane form of geometry to determine that the sun is 18 to 20 times farther away from the Earth than the moon and that its radius is 18 to 20 times greater than that of the moon. He was wrong (the sun is 400 times farther away than the moon and 109 times bigger than the Earth), but Aristarchus’s figures doubled those of his contemporaries. They seemed unnatural to many of his contemporaries, and they drew away from Aristarchus.