Might it not be true, mused Newton, that the sages of old—the members of the “remnant” who had restored the prisca after the Flood—had felt compelled to obscure its deeper meanings from the vulgar simply because the knew that ordinary men couldn’t handle it, not because mankind were stupid, but because we tend so easily to moral corruption?
We’ve already spoken of Wolfgang Pauli as one of the group of twentieth-century scientists, masterfully led by Albert Einstein, who are responsible for mankind’s third giant leap forward in terms of our understanding of the physical universe.
Wolfgang Pauli (1910–1958), a native of Vienna, Austria, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for his discovery of the exclusion principle. Pauli was first a patient, then a friend, and finally a collaborator of the famed analytical psychologist Carl Jung. One of the most brilliant and curmudgeonly hardheaded scientists who ever lived, Pauli came to embrace Jung’s notions of the collective unconscious of mankind and the universe of archetypes that lies behind the visible world.
Pauli was haunted all his life by a spectral otherness for which he could never account. His presence triggered (somehow psychokinetically, because he was never near any of the apparatus) equipment failure. He visited the observatory in Bergesdorf, Germany, and a major accident rendered the telescope useless. The train taking him to Denmark stopped in Göttingen, Germany, and a massive equipment meltdown paralyzed a laboratory at the University of Göttingen.
One night Pauli sat down in a lecture hall and “two dignified-looking ladies simultaneously and symmetrically collapsed with their chairs on either side.” Once, when he was on a train, the rear cars accidentally decoupled and stayed behind while Pauli continued on his way in a front car.
So there was in Pauli already an unasked-for opening to other realms of reality, when, one day in 1932, on the point of complete collapse, he appeared on Carl Jung’s doorstep in Zurich, Switzerland. Jung quickly took him on as a patient. The famed psychologist, in 1936, said that Pauli “has a most remarkable mind and is famous for it. He is no ordinary person. . . . It unfortunately happens that such intellectual people pay no attention to their feeling life and so they lose contact with the world that feels.”39
To coax feeling back into Pauli, Jung encouraged him to search out in his dreams the archetypes and alchemical symbols that, Jung believed, embodied the basic configurations of human emotion. Pauli increasingly had dreams and fantasies in which “terms and concepts from physics appeared in a quantitative and figurative—i.e., symbolic sense.” Pauli decided the “scientific” symbols these personal dreams and fantasies contained were not arbitrary, or subjective, but rather they were proof that “background physics” was archetypal in nature.
Pauli was now collaborating with Jung, and this man who had an incomparable grasp of modern physics decided, astonishingly, that modern science had “come to a dead end.” He wondered if the only way to break through and develop new insights was “to take a radically different approach and return to science’s alchemical roots.” He wrote that, “beginning with Kepler, modern scientists deliberately excluded the anima [inner feminine part of the male personality] as they tried to mechanize the world, partially guided, perhaps, by the image of the Trinity, which they saw in the three dimensions of space.”40
Pauli wanted to get back to the moment when, for the first time, mysticism and alchemy clashed with the new, rational, scientific thinking. He wished to return to the place where Newton was when he toiled simultaneously over his alchemical crucibles and the Principia and believed the two could be reconciled. Pauli didn’t believe mysticism would be resurrected in its old form. He believed, rather, that “the natural sciences will out of themselves bring forth a counter pole in their adherents, which connects with the old mystic elements.” Jungian archetypes would function “as the long sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas, and are, accordingly, a necessary pre-supposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature.”41
So Pauli realized that the despiritualization of science had led to an impasse—and he may, like Newton, have looked gloomily upon the proliferation of atomic bombs around the world in an age when science had all but lost any connection with loftier realms of being. He embraced that concept of archetypes whose reality may (though Pauli doesn’t say so) have accounted for Newton’s intense intimation that his own discoveries had been known in other places and other times in the life of man. (Does the idea of archetypes account for the whole notion of the prisca sapientia?) Pauli, like Newton, looked back to Pythagoras—and also, like Newton, to Archimedes—and we will see, in the next and final chapter of this book, just how powerful these influences were on Isaac Newton, and just how much they may have accounted for the dismay and anger he felt as he entered his final years.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SON OF ARCHIMEDES
When a physicist becomes entranced with the symbolic and aesthetic qualities of the quantum theory and begins to see it as a forum for contemplation, rather than a problem to be solved in order to make a bigger bomb, then he begins to see that there is a higher level of hieroglyphic knowledge in which art, religion and science reconverge.
WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON, DARKNESS AND SCATTERED LIGHT
In 1694, word got around the scientific community that Isaac Newton had gone mad.
Christiaan Huygens wrote in his journal that he was told on May 29
that Isaac Newton, the celebrated mathematician, eighteen months previously, had become deranged in his mind, either from too great application to his studies, or from excessive grief at having lost, by fire, his chemical laboratory and some papers. Having made observations before the alienation of his intellect, he was taken care of by his friends, and being confined to his house, remedies were applied, by means of which he has lately so far recovered his health as to begin to again understand his own Principia.1
Huygens took it for granted that Newton’s career was ended. In early 1695, two different sources told John Flamsteed that Newton was dead. That summer, the philosopher Johann Christoph Sturm informed the mathematician John Wallis that Newton’s house and all the books in it had been destroyed in a fire and that Newton himself was “so disturbed in mind thereupon, as to be reduced to very ill circumstances.”2
Wallis knew this wasn’t so. He knew Newton had had a nervous breakdown, and told Sturm this. Two other Englishmen, both very distinguished, had known about the breakdown from the start. They were Samuel Pepys, chief administrator of the Royal Navy and diarist, and the philosopher John Locke. On September 13, 1693, Pepys had received a letter from Newton that read in part: “I am extremely troubled by the embroilment I am in, and have neither ate nor slept well this twelve month, nor have my former consistency of mind. I never designed to get anything by your interest, nor by King James’s favor, but am now sensible that I must withdraw from your acquaintance, and see neither you nor the rest of my friends anymore.”3
Three days later, John Locke received a similar letter. One paragraph read: “Being of opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live I answered ’twere better you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness.”
Newton confessed that in the presence of others he had accused Locke of trying to set him up with prostitutes. He apologized for harboring evil thoughts that Locke was an immoral man and a follower of the atheist Thomas Hobbes. Newton signed the letter: “Your most humble and most unfortunate servant, Is. Newton.”4
The two very distinguished Englishmen responded calmly and compassionately to these letters. Richard Westfall writes: “One cannot sufficiently admire Pepys and Locke. Confronted without warning with such letters, neither gave thought to taking offense. Rather both assumed at once that Newton was ill and acted accordingly.”5
Pepys made discreet inquiries at Cambridge and received reassurances that Newton was perfectly sane, though he h
ad been indisposed. Two months later, the diarist sent the mathematician a dignified letter in which, rather than inquire about Newton’s health, he asked him a complex question about gambling odds; Pepys needed the information for a lottery investment he was thinking of making, but he also wanted to see how well Newton could still reason. (Newton solved the problem overnight and mailed the answer the next day.)
Locke waited two weeks, then replied with a letter that was a simple expression of “humanity and forgiveness, a tender witness of his ‘love and esteem.’”6
By the end of 1693, Newton was apparently his old self again. He sent apologies to both men, explaining that for a year he had been in a state of exhaustion and anxiety that culminated in his not being able to sleep for more than an hour a night for two weeks and not being able to sleep at all for five days. His letters, he assured them, were solely the product of his a sadly disordered state of mind.
What caused Newton’s nervous breakdown? It’s easy to say it was the immense labor of writing the Principia Mathematica. But the book had been completed six years earlier.
Was mercury poisoning a factor? Newton had been doing alchemical experiments almost every day for thirty years, and almost every day he had tested mercury on the tip of his tongue. Chronic mercury poisoning can cause sleeplessness and paranoid delusions, but there are other significant symptoms that Newton did not exhibit.
We can’t discount the role Newton’s young protégé Nicholas Fatio de Duillier might have played in his breakdown. The two met when Newton was forty-five and the Swiss mathematical genius twenty-three, and took to each other immediately.
Early in 1693, the charming and volatile Fatio seemed to be on the point of moving from London to Cambridge to be near Newton. The great mathematician was very willing that this should happen. Then Fatio abruptly returned to the Continent. This was just weeks before Newton’s nervous breakdown. Isaac Newton had no involvements with women during his life and died a virgin; he probably felt more love for the engaging young Swiss polymath than he did for any other person in his life. Frank Manuel speculates that Newton’s feelings for Fatio had a sexual aspect and “reached a high pitch” early in 1693, “creating a demand for repression that was an element in the breakdown.”*567
But only an element. Perhaps there is a more fundamental reason why Isaac Newton had a nervous breakdown.
There is something else. At the latter end of the century Newton became master of the London Mint. Today we marvel at how successful Newton was when he exchanged the dreaming spires of Cambridge for the grimy smokestacks of London. At Cambridge he was an absent-minded professor living in an ivory tower. In London he was a world-class administrator, striding purposefully through the corridors of a long, narrow building attached to the Tower of London that housed nine clattering coin presses. He held this position for twenty years and proved a most able public servant. Richard Westfall extols him for having been able to “pick up the threads of a practical pursuit and to perform it with distinction.”8
Newton had his nervous breakdown at about the same time as he first decided to leave Cambridge and look for a position in London. He didn’t actually move to London until 1695, but the decision was made in 1693, and it may be that it unleashed in Newton a storm of conflicting psychic forces that immobilized him for many weeks and sent the rumor flying about Europe that Isaac Newton had gone mad.
Up until early 1687, when he was completing book 3 of the Principia Mathematica, Newton was not much interested in the world beyond the gates of Trinity College and relatively innocent of the evil that flared up in the bloody arena that was Augustan political life. What little he knew of evil he’d gleaned from the ancient tomes he’d studied periodically so he could put together his various nonscientific writings—in particular, that somber thread, running through many of these, that we’ve been calling his “History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man.”
But this secondhand exposure to evil wasn’t enough to make Newton heed the warning of Moses and Pythagoras that the highest knowledge should be hidden from the commonality of mankind, since the ordinary run of man and woman couldn’t be expected to do more than misunderstand and abuse such knowledge and might well turn it to evil purposes. He took this seriously—but not seriously enough to make him say no to Edmund Halley when the latter begged him to write a book that would reveal Newton’s own highest knowledge to the world. Instead, he went on to write the Principia Mathematica.
Something was about to happen that would make Newton regret that decision.
He was about to have a personal encounter with evil.
You can find scattered here and there in Barbados today white men who’ve never intermarried with the blacks and who call themselves “red legs.” They are the descendants of twelve hundred rebels whom the British government sold as slaves to the island plantations in 1685. The white slaves were the mark of George Jeffries, one day to be Lord Chief Justice of England and the man behind the deportation—a man, in the words of one historian, “whose brutal nature, savage partisanship and high professional gifts made him the perfect instrument of judicial murder.”9
Charles II had died early in 1685, and the Catholic king James II succeeded him to the throne. A small army led by the protestant pre-tender to the throne the Duke of Monmouth took the field against James but was roundly defeated after a short and bloody campaign.
Lord George Jeffries presided over the tribunal set up to punish Monmouth and the army. History calls it the “Bloody Assise.” Jeffries hung three hundred men, sold many more into slavery, and personally sold hundreds of pardons—at illegal and exorbitant rates—to the captive soldiers. He made sure the imprisoned daughters of well-to-do families who had taken part in the rebellion were set free only after their families paid enormous ransoms.
From the moment James II came to the throne, he favored England’s Catholics and promoted them to high office. In 1687, James ordered Cambridge to award a master of arts degree to a Benedictine monk named Alban Francis. The king stipulated that Father Francis should not be required to take the usual oaths of loyalty to the Anglican Church.
The regents of the solidly Protestant university of Cambridge did not dare defy James. Isaac Newton, his loathing of the papacy aroused, leaped into the fray. He rallied the university to stand up to the Catholic king. He warned of the dangers of setting a precedent if it bowed to James’s demands. He assembled documents and statutes to prove James was legally in the wrong. In general Newton stiffened the spines of his unworldly colleagues. In April, Cambridge vice chancellor John Peachell, better known for his drinking prowess than his scholarly achievements, was summoned to appear with representatives of the university before the Court of Ecclesiastic Commission in London. Newton was one of the delegation of eight.
Presiding over the court was the notorious Lord George Jeffries.
The eight dons knew Jeffries had been the mastermind of the Bloody Assise, and they knew that Londoners called him the Hanging Judge. What met their eyes when they entered the court didn’t belie what they had heard. Judge Jeffries’s voluminous black robes of a presiding magistrate failed to hide his obesity; and, since he was hunched forward over the bench in an almost predatory fashion, his notoriety, combined with his appearance, made the dons think of a huge, overfed vulture; only the skewed white periwig on his head made him look vaguely human. His face was hollowed, ridged, and pockmarked above a jagged fringe of gray beard. His tiny eyes seemed blank and unseeing, unstamped coins stuck in his head. Jeffries was a man of crude yet formidable power, but he was also a ghoul, a vampire, a bloodsucker. His voice was hoarse, breathless, and low; apart from his words, which struck them like hammer blows, that voice seemed not to resonate so much as to suck the vitality out of them. From one harangue to the next, he exhausted them.
During the first two sessions the dons made their case; Jeffries responded with mockery, contempt, and invective. The arbitrariness of his words dismayed them; they could find in them little
connection to justice. At the third session, Jeffries asked Peachell point-blank why he had disobeyed the king’s order. Perhaps because he had been in his cups earlier that day, the vice chancellor couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer; then and there, Jeffries stripped him of his position along with his salary.
It would have been at this point that a sense of the evil in the world entered Newton’s bones. In confronting James, the dons had put their careers on the line, Newton’s no less than any. And now it struck him that if there were any justice in this courtroom, it was largely accidental. His livelihood could be cut off at any moment. The case against James he had so meticulously set forth was no guarantee against the arbitrary cruelty of this judge.
But at the final session the eight dons were surprised and relieved when the mastermind of the Bloody Assise did no more than dismiss them (albeit with scorn and contempt), admonishing the dons to “Go your way, and sin no more, lest a worse thing come to you” (John 5:14). Near the end, a dread thought must have passed through Newton’s mind. There were Jeffries everywhere. Many ruled the land. Newton would have been devastated by this realization. They would not be expected to apply Newton’s equations to the world in an ethical manner. Newton suddenly felt a profound sense of guilt: Halley was wrong, and Pythagoras and Moses were right: the world was not good enough for its finest creation. He had made a great mistake in writing the Principia and releasing it to the world.
It was in a state of exaltation that the dons left the Court of Ecclesiastic Commission. Newton shared their enthusiasm, but it was overshadowed by the guilt he now felt at having betrayed his equations.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 38