The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

But he was proud of the Principia, and so he repressed his guilt.

  It lingered, and festered.

  Father Francis never received his degree—“not least,” writes Richard Westfall, “because Newton had refused to be frightened.”10 James II was overthrown near the end of 1688, and the protestant Dutch sovereign William of Orange was placed on the throne of England. Jeffries was hurried off to the Tower of London, where he died after five miserable years.

  Newton had demonstrated leadership, personal bravery, and moral integrity during the standoff with James, and he was given much of the credit for its success. He had shown that he could act with great effectiveness in the greater world beyond Cambridge University; perhaps he hadn’t known that himself when he climbed down from his ivory tower to help his fellow dons.

  Everybody knew what Newton had done; doors were opened to him that hadn’t been open before, and it would have been impolitic for him not to walk through a few. Cambridge asked him to run for one of two seats as a university representative in the Commission Parliament scheduled to convene in January 1688 to ratify William’s succession. Newton accepted, and was elected. He arrived in London early in the new year and began a one-year stay in the city by dining with William of Orange and two others on January 17.

  It’s likely Newton attended every session of the Commission Parliament and the regular Parliament that followed it. He spoke only once, and that one time, or so the story goes, was to ask an usher to close a window because he felt a draft. Newton watched over the interests of Cambridge assiduously. He watched everything; he heard everything; he saw great men honorably advancing the interests of England, and he saw these same great men equivocate, lie, and deceive. He witnessed men of undoubted nobility at work and men not unlike Judge George Jeffries. He saw much to admire, and much to abhor. Men were two-faced creatures; both faces, it seemed, the reprehensible and the saintly, were needed to conduct the business of this nation.

  England was at war with France in 1690; vast sums of money were requisitioned regularly, almost arbitrarily. Detailed reports of battles, prepared for Parliament only, were read aloud; this information was kept from the public. Newton was appalled by the number of casualties—and yet such slaughter was surely necessary if it were a question of crushing the Catholic king Louis XIV. It may have been at this time that he began to feel that the application of science to warfare did not, as he would later disingenuously put it, “serve the interests of science.” Some years later, he cautioned David Gregory’s son to have nothing to do with a new cannon his father (who was an early expert on Newton’s Principia) was developing. In later years Newton would profess that he had no interest in the practical applications of science; sometimes he expressed hostility to the very idea of technological progress. He would always believe, writes Manuel, that the practical use of his equations should be “controlled by the two fundamentals of religion, love of neighbor and love of God as set forth in Scripture.”11 And all through his life he would see that this rarely happened. Newton must have come away from his year as a parliamentarian with the growing conviction that mankind, always needing to defend itself, usually desperate, could not be trusted—not even its best-intentioned members—to apply Newton’s equations to the world in a way that could be beneficial to all.

  Back behind the timeless walls of Trinity, Newton threw himself into his studies with as much vigor as before. He plunged into a new attempt to understand why gravity happened, carefully examining those achievements of the scientists of the ancient world that seemed to have bearing on his universal law of gravitation. He tackled anew a problem he had left unresolved in his treatment of optics: whether the forces responsible for optical effects operate not only on the macro level but on the micro level as well. The solution he came up with was so outlandish, so “far out” even by Newton’s standards, that he decided to drop this line of inquiry lest that solution “should be accounted an extravagant freak.”12

  Newton continued to work furiously on theology, church history, and chronology, and it was at this time that he coaxed out into the open (but still hid) the corrupted texts of the New Testament. He continued to hide his Arianism and, to some extent, his alchemy. And (or so we are suggesting) he continued to hide from himself his growing sense of guilt at having revealed his equations to the unappreciative and perhaps dangerous masses.

  Newton’s yearlong exposure to the vibrant life of London had changed him: he was becoming more interested in people. Much shouldn’t be made of this; Isaac Newton remained aloof, autocratic, and dangerously touchy. But he became less elusive. You could run after him on his brisk walks through the Trinity gardens, catch up with him, stop him, talk to him. More and more people were getting to see the inside of his apartment with its gleaming columns of mint guinea pieces stacked on the windowsills and its impeccably arranged and very eclectic furniture. Newton served rather inexpensive wine at these tête-à-têtes but made up for it with the startling richness of some of his observations.

  Beyond the confines of Cambridge University, Newton was becoming the most famous natural philosopher in the world. The rich, the famous, and the powerful sought him out. He was drawn to power, this man who dreaded what those in power might do to his equations. In about 1691—we’re not sure when—he began to think about leaving Cambridge for a nonacademic position in London.

  Why? The creative power of even the greatest of mathematicians begins to wane when they are in their late fifties, and Newton was no exception. But his mind, his thirst for knowledge, his inquisitiveness, his sheer level of energy, were as powerful as ever, and he began to cast about restlessly for new worlds to conquer. And he may have felt the need for a richer intellectual community than that offered by Cambridge.

  But a move to London presented not only practical but psychological difficulties for Newton.

  Many of the great writers of the world have looked with a jaundiced eye on the great cities of the world. Kóstya Lévin, the country-estate-owning protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, regarded rural life as wholly good and urban life as wholly bad. He even (as did Tolstoy) condemned the lavish opera productions of the city of Moscow as contrived and artificial—fundamentally deceitful. Joseph Conrad called London “the cruel devourer of the world’s light,” while Charles Dickens hit out at the British capital as “a place of great energy, but also of constant deceit, of others and of oneself.”

  The puritanical child in Newton who saw London as Babylon; the pious child in Newton who, as a man confronting Jeffries, felt the life’s blood drained out of him by that raucous voice and realized men like this could be expected to apply his equations without the slightest reverence for God’s will, this combined with what he’d seen of certain parliamentarians whose type was everywhere and who could be expected to apply his equations only with ruthless pragmatism—all of this (which he had immediately repressed beause of the grief and guilt he now felt at having published the Principia) must have come welling up into his conscious mind. But not quite into his conscious mind. He could not afford to feel any of this, and he quickly repressed it.

  But the decision to go to London would have stirred up this buried knowledge. This repressed material would have risen almost, but not quite, to the forefront of his consciousness; it would have been vaguely sensed and not fully understood by Newton. His divided mind would have feared that he himself, once in London and surrounded by the city’s corrupting practices, would gradually forget his good intentions vis-à-vis his equations and even, however inadvertently, aid and abet those who sought to profit from them without thought of the welfare of humanity.

  We know that for Newton the Puritan, London was a Babylon, and the great but vulnerable mathematician feared its allurements. This comes out in his letters to Locke and Pepys: Locke foisting prostitutes on him and Pepys forcing him to pull strings for high preferment were merely the mirror of his terror that the corruption of the world he was about to enter would be too powerful for him to resist; tha
t the world itself, and not his friends, would impose these horrors on him.

  Some time in mid-1693, in the weeks before he made his final decision to go to London, all this erupted chaotically into Newton’s mind. He may not have understood it exactly, but somehow over the next two years he worked through it sufficiently that late 1695 found him the warden of the London Mint.

  As has been noted, behind Newton’s pessimism lay the conviction, shared by many of his peers, that the universe had been becoming steadily more corrupt and the human race was now on its last ropes. A model for this was the decline and fall of four empires, each one less powerful than the last, expressed in the four visions of Daniel. This model itself recapitulated the concept, given voice by the Greek poet Hesiod in the ninth century BC, of the four ever-declining ages of mankind: the Gold, the Silver, the Lead, and the Clay. The Golden Age began in the Garden of Eden; mankind now lives in pain and suffering in the twilight years of the Clay Age.

  But another, quite different current of thought was making its way through England at the time. Its advocates did not believe the world was dying; they believed it was changing for the better and that science could help it immeasurably. It held out the hope that man was perfectible and it contained the seeds of the modern-day conception of progress. Its great proponent was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a judge and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon scholar Hugh G. Dick explains:

  When he [Bacon] looked about him, he came to realize (as others had done) that three recent discoveries—printing, gunpowder, and the compass—had done more to transform the world in which he lived than had any political theory or school of philosophy. “For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” Awakened by these realizations, Bacon felt compelled to review the whole intellectual history of the western world to see why philosophy had been so productive of words but so barren of fruit for the “benefit and use of life.”13

  Bacon believed mankind would develop new tools at the same time as he systematically acquired greater knowledge of himself; in such a way would a necessary balance be maintained. But Bacon overestimated mankind. In her 2014 bestseller This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein puts him at the beginning of a chain of events that culminated in global warming. She writes:

  If the modern-day extractive [fossil fuel–producing] economy has a patron saint, the honor should probably go to Francis Bacon. The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman is credited with convincing Britain’s elites to abandon, once and for all, pagan notions of the earth as a life-giving mother figure to whom we owe respect and reverence (and more than a little fear) and accept the role as her dungeon warden.14

  Isaac Newton was no son of Francis Bacon. He did not regard the earth as a life-giving mother but as a giant riddle that if unraveled properly would reveal God’s benevolent activities in the world. We should not exploit the fruits of these activities; rather, we should respect, reverence, and adore God for having so acted. It was not for us to command the Earth, but to adore it; and the worldly applications of Newton’s equations (which were descriptions of those activities of God in the world) must be conducted in the same spirit. Newton’s ideas, his inclinations—the promptings of his soul—had little affinity with Baconism. They went back to the third century BC.

  He was the son of Archimedes.

  The Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who besieged the Carthage-controlled city of Syracuse in Sicily from AD 210 to 212, had a reputation for personal bravery; he had twice fought the enemy in single man-to-man combat, emerging victorious and earning the right to spare his army a battle.

  But what he saw from the swaying deck of his trireme on the first day of the siege of Syracuse was enough to make even the bravest soldier want to turn and flee. From the heights of the fortified walls of the city, weapons he’d never seen before rained terror down on the Roman fleet. Plutarch tells us that

  huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane’s beak and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them. A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air (a dreadful thing to behold), and rolled to and fro, and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashed against the rocks, or let fall.15

  The Romans had brought with them a floating siege tower with grappling hooks; it rested on a bridge of planks stretched across eight ships. Earlier in the day, Marcellus had watched as three giant boulders, plummeting down the face of wall, shattered the siege tower and sent it flying in pieces into the turbulent water. Roman battleships scraped against each other as they maneuvered to escape the falling rocks. Their crews were so unnerved that when the slightest object, like a rope or a beam of wood, suddenly protruded from the city walls, they turned their vessels around and tried to get away.

  The siege of Syracuse lasted for two years. The city’s defenders didn’t weaken, and the uncanny war machines, continually replaced or repaired, never stopped raining destruction on the Roman fleet. Only a ruse, based on a weakness Marcellus detected in Syracuse’s defenses while he was conducting negotiations, enabled his men to overwhelm the city and slaughter or take prisoner most of its defenders.

  These extraordinary war machines had never been seen before. They would rarely be seen again. They were the creation of the illustrious Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC). This was the man who, according to leg-end, ran naked through the streets of Athens crying, “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”) when he discovered, while sitting in his bath, that a sinking object displaces its volume in fluid; it was the same Archimedes who understood the principles of levers so well that he could boast, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the world!”*57

  Archimedes had been reluctant to build these war machines. He had done so only at the request of King Hiero II of Syracuse, who was his friend and near relation—and besides, it was never wise to disobey a king. But perhaps it would have been wise in this case; Archimedes was accidentally killed when the Roman soldiers swarmed across the city.

  He left no blueprints of his brilliantly destructive war machines. Archimedes disdained all engineering as “the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry”; he believed, like Plato, that applied science shamefully turned its back “upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence, [so as] to recur to sensation and to ask help (not to be obtained without base supervisions and deprivation) from matter.”16

  Yet Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on these subjects; but, repudiating as sordid or ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life; studies, the superiority of which to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, of the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our attention.17

  Isaac Newton possessed an equally high spirit and an equally pro-found soul. His sometime Cambridge roommate, William Wickins, reminiscing to his son many years later about the time he spent with Newton, decla
red:

  When he has sometimes taken a turn or two [he] has made a sudden stand, turned himself about, run up the stairs like another Archimedes, with an εὔρηκαevprjKa [Eureka], and fall[en] to write at his desk standing, without giving himself the leisure to draw a chair to sit down on. At some seldom times when he designed to dine in the hall, [he] would turn to the left hand and go out into the street, when making a stop when he found his mistake, would hastily turn back, and then sometimes instead of going into the hall, would return to his chamber again.18

  Plutarch adds of Archimedes:

  His familiar and domestic Siren made him forget his food and neglect his person, to that degree that when he was occasionally carried by absolute violence to bathe or have his body anointed, he used to trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and diagrams in the oil on his body, being in a state of entire preoccupation, and, in the truest sense, divine possession with his love and delight in science.19

  Behind Newton and Archimedes looms the godlike figure of Pythagoras. Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans maintained that mankind’s duty was to “honor first the Immortal Gods—themselves Numbers—before embarking on any enterprise.”20 Numbers were the supreme reality, the ground of all other realities (which by comparison were not real). For Pythagoras, even to discuss geometry, let alone apply it to the world, was to sully the immortal form of Number. Isaac Newton tells us that Pythagoras believed the contemplation of pure Number could bring us to the knowledge of God himself. Newton wrote: “Hence the Pythagorean harmony is between God acting harmoniously and matter reacting harmoniously, and the geometrical elements, which are composed of numbers and their symmetry, are the whole of nature. Hence in Lucian, Pythagoras says you will come to know God himself, who is number and harmony.”21

  Despite the chasm of more than two thousand years separating them, Newton had striking affinities with Archimedes and Pythagoras. As has been mentioned earlier, if Newton had been left to his own devices it’s possible he would never have made his discoveries known to the world. He would probably have retired to his mother’s estate in Woolsthorpe. The scholar Derek Gjertsen writes that, had Newton done this,