The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  *39. New Age enthusiasts will be intrigued to learn that Halley, in a paper read to the Royal Society in 1691, advanced the hypothesis that the Earth is partially hollow. Trying to explain anomalous magnetic compass readings around the world, he speculated that the Earth might be made up of a 500-mile-thick outer shell we walk on, a second concentric shell roughly the diameter of Venus, a third the diameter of Mars, and an innermost core the size of the planet Mercury. He wondered if the inner regions might have atmospheres, or be illuminated, or be inhabited, or if the three spheres rotated on their axes at different speeds.

  *40. In his conversation with Conduitt, Newton revealed “that he thought the inner planets of the solar system would be devastated by a comet that would crash into the Sun and cause it to dramatically expand. Newton thought that there was life on other planets, and he told Conduitt that the 1572 and 1604 supernovas were the result of the same process happening in other star systems.” Late in the seventeenth century Newton had also “told David Gregory the satellites of Jupiter were proto-Earths that were ‘held in reserve’ by God to repopulate the solar system after the cometary cataclysm.” (The Newton Project, www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/tour/newton-on-science-and-religion.)

  *41. This scandal was one reason (the main one being that it had been written by Isaac Newton) there was a bidding war for this obscure chronology/history book when Newton’s heirs offered it for publication. The winning team of two publishers bought the rights for £350, a huge sum at the time.

  *42. “Where they [a branch of the Phoenicians called the Curetes] settled [in Greece] they wrought first in copper, ’till iron was invented, and then in iron; and when they had made themselves armor, they danced in it at the sacrifices with tumult and clamor, and bells, and pipes, and drums, and swords, with which they struck upon one another’s armor, in musical times, appearing seized with a divine fury; and this is reckoned the original [origin] of music in Greece.” (Newton, Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 146–47.)

  *43. It’s much easier to be a king or queen today; does Newton’s law of regnal length still apply? If we add up the lengths of reign of the last six rulers of Great Britain—Victoria (64 years) + Edward VII (9) + George V (26) + Edward VIII (1) + George VI (16) + Elizabeth II (64) = 179—and divide by 6, we get 29.833. . . (almost 30) years. Victoria ruled for 64 years, and Elizabeth II is in her 66th year as queen, but Edward VIII’s mere one year helps bring the average down to only ten more than Newton calculated.

  *44. “There’s the golden RAM, the ensign of the Vessel in which Phryxus fled to Colchis; the BULL with brazen hoofs tamed by Jason; and the TWINS, CASTOR and POLLUX, two of the Argonauts, with the SWAN of Leda their mother. There’s the Ship ARGO, and HYDRUS the watchful Dragon; with Medea’s CUP, and a RAVEN upon its Carcass, the Symbol of Death. There’s CHIRON the master of Jason, with his ALTAR and SACRIFICE. There’s the Argonaut HERCULES with his DART and VULTURE falling down; and the DRAGON, CRAB and LION, whom he slew; and the HARP of the Argonaut Orpheus. All these relate to the Argonauts. There’s ORION the son of Neptune, or as some say, the grandson of Minos, with his DOGS, and HARE, and RIVER, and SCORPION. There’s the story of Perseus in the Constellations of PERSEUS, ANDROMEDA, CEPHEUS, CASSIOPEA and CETUS: That of Callisto, and her son Arcas, in URSA MAJOR and ARCTOPHYLAX: That of Icareus and his daughter Erigone in BOOTES, PLAUSTRUM and VIRGO. URSA MINOR relates to one of the Nurses of Jupiter, AURIGA to Erechthonius, OPHIUCHUS to Phorbas, SAGITTARIUS to Crolus the son of the Nurse of the Muses, CAPRICORN to Pan, and AQUARIUS to Ganimede. There’s Ariadne’s CROWN, Bellerophon’s HORSE, Neptune’s DOLPHIN, Ganimede’s EAGLE, Jupiter’s GOAT with her KIDS, Bacchus’s ASSES, and the FISHES of Venus and Cupid, and their Parent the SOUTH FISH. These with DELTOTON, are the old Constellations mentioned by Aratus: and they all relate to the Argonauts and their Contemporaries, and to Persons one or two Generations older.” (Newton, Chronology, chap. 1, “Of the Chronology of the First Ages of the Greeks,” www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00186.)

  *45. Our chronologist friends from Soviet Russia (see chapter 12) will have nothing to do with these figures, which they consider to be hopelessly distorted by politics. In Christ: A History of Human Culture from the Standpoint of the Natural Sciences, the Russian mathematician-topologist Nicolai Aleksandrovich Morozov calculated the dates of the three eclipses of the Peloponnesian War at AD 1133, 1140, and 1151!

  *46. That Phaenomena survived as well as it did is extraordinary. Eighty percent of the literary works of high antiquity have not survived. Like the archives, annals, and historical records of the ancient world mentioned in the previous chapter, they were destroyed in the blistering wars and social convulsions of ancient times.

  Of the Greek tragedians, Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BC) wrote 70 to 90 plays; 7 have survived. Sophocles (497–406 BC) wrote 123 plays; 7 have survived. Euripides wrote 92 plays; 18 have survived. The great Greek comedian Aristophanes (447–386 BC) wrote 44 plays; 11 have survived. Even Homer’s works did not escape the juggernaut of war; there is a legend that the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey wrote a third, now lost, comedic epic called Margites. Every one of the works of Greek New Comedy, a genre that flourished from 323 to 260 BC, was lost until 1952, when a papyrus copy of a play by the genre’s master, Menander (342–291 BC)—Dyscolos (The Curmudgeon)—turned up in Egypt.

  *47. Century 1, quatrain 9, of the Prophecies reads: “From the East will come a treacherous act / To vex Hadrie and the heirs of Romulus [Italy] / Accompanied by the Libyan fleet, / The temples of the Maltese [trembling] and its islands emptied.” (Hogue, Nostradamus, 73.)

  *48. In 1965, the French secret service attempted to topple the president of Guinea, Ahmed Sekou-Touré, from power by flooding the country with counterfeit French francs. Guinea’s economy was ruined. Sekou-Touré remained in power.

  *49. Anne Finch, Viscountess of Conway (aka Anne Conway)(1631–1679), whom Newton almost certainly knew, is another one of those unsung female geniuses who only with great difficulty were able to express themselves before the nineteenth century. Anne’s father, who died a week before she was born, was speaker of the House of Commons. Growing up in a privileged milieu, often in the company of scholars, she learned French, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, mathematics, and philosophy. Between 1671 and 1674 (or 1677 and 1679), she wrote an anti-Cartesian work The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy; Anne died without having a chance to revise it or correct it. Her famous friend and colleague Francis Mercury von Helmont translated Principles into Latin, published it, and showed it to his friend the philosopher/mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Scholars consider Anne Finch to have been in many ways a perceptive forerunner of Leibniz. Von Helmont’s translation was published anonymously, which is one reason why it was virtually unknown until the past century. It is available at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/conway/principles/principles.html.

  *50. Homer tells the same story in the Odyssey, using the Greek names Hephaistos (Vulcan), Aphrodite (Venus), and Ares (Mars): “Now to his harp the blinded minstrel sang / of Ares’ dalliance with Aphrodite: / how hidden in Hephaistos’ house they played / at love together, and the gifts of Ares, / dishonoring Hephaistos’ bed—and how / the word that wounds the heart came to the master / from Helios [Apollo], who had seen the two embrace; / and when he learned it, Lord Hephaistos went / with baleful calculation to his forge. . . .” (Homer, Odyssey, 8.280–88.)

  *51. The term prisca theologia, or “pristine theology,” is also used. The two terms are almost interchangeable. Throughout this book, we use the term prisca sapientia. It should be thought of as including the term prisca theologia.

  *52. Plutarch writes of a certain Cleanthes (330–230 BC) who “thought it was the duty of Greeks to indict Aristarchus of Samos on the charge of impiety for putting in motion the Hearth of the Universe [the earth]” (qtd. in Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, 304). As far as we know, Aristarchus was never indicted; but thereafter he said nothing ab
out a heliocentric universe.

  *53. Plutarch is here drawing upon Plato, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, “All the great arts require discussion and high speculation about the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completeness of execution. And this, as I conceive, was the quality which in addition to his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from his intercourse with Anaxagoras, whom he happened to know. He was thus imbued with the higher philosophy, and attained the knowledge of Mind and the negative of Mind, which were favorite themes of Anaxagoras, and applied what suited his purpose to the art of speaking.” (Socrates, Dialogues of Plato, 1:273.)

  *54. Theano was a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and administrator. She and Pythagoras had a daughter, Damo (ca. 535–475 BC), who may have published several of her father’s treatises. Some fragments of Theano’s writings have survived.

  *55. For a lengthy excerpt from Newton’s discussion of the achievements of the scientists of the ancient world, see appendix E.

  *56. Fatio, who had once been seen as the heir apparent to Newton, abandoned his career in mathematics bit by bit. In 1707, he surfaced in London as a “French Prophet”—part of a band of Protestant enthusiasts, newly exiled from France, who “ranted in the streets and conducted wild séances during which frenzied men and women prophesied the imminent coming of Judgment Day.” The authorities put two of these charismatic prophets in the stocks. One was the recording secretary of the Prophets: Nicholas Fatio de Duillier. A hysterical streak in Fatio had gradually taken hold; he never got back to mathematics and died alone at eighty-two. (Manuel, A Portrait, 288.)

  *57. Plutarch renders this line as, “if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.” (Plutarch, Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, 376.)

  *58. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years, or 2.511 × 10¹³ (21 trillion) miles from Earth, about nine times farther than Huygens estimated.

  †1. The cities of Merv, in Turkmenistan; Gundeshapur, in Iran; and Kashgar, in China; had archbishops long before Canterbury in England acquired its own archbishop in 597.

  †2. This passage is from Newton’s “Untitled Treatise on Revelation” (section 1.4). The reader wishing for clarification will find a 3,200-word excerpt from the “Untitled Treatise,” including this passage, in appendix D.

  †3. Gustave Flaubert provides us with a succinct description of the Jewish Messiah in his story “Herodias”: “The Jews gave the name of Messiah to a liberator who would give them possession of all goods and dominion over all peoples. Some even maintained that two Messiahs were to be looked for. The first would be vanquished by Gog and Magog, demons of the north, but the other would exterminate the Prince of Evil, and for centuries they had been expecting him to arrive any minute. . . . The Messiah would be a son of David and not of a carpenter. Then, too, he would uphold the Law, whereas this Nazarene attacked it.” (Flaubert, “Herodias,” 115.)

  †4. Do the names of Noah’s family hint at the gods and goddesses they purportedly became? We know that “Ham” means “hot” in Hebrew, and the name of Noah’s eldest son may also have affinities with “Héammu” (as in Hammurapi), a west Semitic sun god; that “Shem,” the name of Noah’s middle son, is perhaps associated with the Sumerian “Kengir” (sometimes “S[h]umer”), the Sumerian term for southern Mesopotamia (which Shem is supposed to have settled); and that “Japheth” may be etymologically linked with the Greek “Iapetos,” one of the Titans. But these connections are so obscure as to prove nothing. The author is indebted to Michael Avioz, Department of Bible, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, for much of this information.

  †5. Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.

  †6. The Golden Fleece was another name for the Philosophers’ Stone, and so the argonautic mission must also have had resonances for Newton in terms of his attempts, through years of alchemical practices, to transmute base metals into gold.

  †7. Mercury is a clear, yielding, metallic liquid, still called “quicksilver” (“quick” means living); sulphur is “solid, yellow like the sun, arousing thought associations of raucous, stifling heat.” It is not yielding, but aggressive. (Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 4:455–56.)

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER ONE. “A HISTORY OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE SOUL OF MAN”

  1. Westfall, Never at Rest, 473.

  2. Gjertsen, “Newton’s Success,” 29.

  3. Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” 187.

  4. Ferris, “Measuring an Intellect.”

  5. See www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk.

  6. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton (1642–1727): Natural Philosopher,” 6.

  7. Force and Popkin, Newton and Religion, x.

  8. Manual, Religion, 17.

  9. Gleick, Isaac Newton, 90.

  10. Christianson, Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution, 30.

  11. Ferris, “Measuring an Intellect.”

  12. Stukeley, “Memoir of Newton.”

  13. Stukeley, “Memoir of Newton.”

  14. Stukeley, “Memoir of Newton.”

  15. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton . . . Natural Philosopher,” 1.

  16. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton . . . Natural Philosopher,” 5.

  17. Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe, 289.

  18. Popkin, “Plans for Publishing,” 2.

  19. Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” 200.

  20. Qtd. in Dry, The Newton Papers, 158.

  21. Qtd. in Dry, The Newton Papers, 160, 162.

  CHAPTER TWO. THE NEWTON CODE

  1. Snobelen, “‘A Time and Times,’” 539–40.

  2. Snobelen, “‘A Time and Times,’” 541.

  3. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “For 11th straight month, the globe was record warm.” April 19, 2016, www.noaa.gov/11th-straight-month-globe-was-record-warm.

  4. Klein, This Changes Everything, 31.

  5. Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of St. John, chap. 1, “Introduction, Concerning the Time When the Apocalypse Was Written.”

  6. Bournis, “St. John on Patmos,” 42–44.

  7. Ebon, “In the Grotto of St. John,” 3–4.

  8. Durant, Caesar and Christ, 594.

  9. Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of St. John, chap. 1.

  10. Pagels, Revelations, 163.

  11. Pagels, Revelations, 11–13.

  12. Pagels, Revelations, 1.

  13. Pagels, Revelations, 2.

  14. Grosso, The Millennium Myth, 23.

  15. Grosso, The Millennium Myth, 23.

  16. Jung, “The Dark Side of God,” 89–100.

  17. Grosso, The Millennium Myth, 19.

  18. Ingermanson, Who Wrote the Bible Code? 26.

  19. Clouse, “The Apocalyptic Interpretation of Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede,” 181.

  20. Clouse, “The Apocalyptic Interpretation of Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede,” 183.

  21. Buchwald and Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization, 132.

  22. Manuel, Religion of Isaac Newton, 224.

  23. Westfall, Never at Rest, 349.

  24. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, 141.

  25. Force, Whiston, 114.

  26. Qtd. in Goff, 2.

  27. Apollonius, The Voyage of Argo, 82 (Argonautica, 2:314–16).

  28. Qtd. in Goff, “The Millennial Scientist,” 2.

  29. Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00209.

  30. Westfall, Never at Rest, 327–28.

  31. Murrin, “Newton’s Apocalypse,” 210.

  32. Newton,“Two Incomplete Treatises on Prophecy,” www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00005.

  33. BBC, A History of the World, www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/GOe8Mt6vRdSNcg-yeivrEA.

  34. Qtd. in Ben Uzziel, The Chaldee Paraphrase, vi.

  35. Newton, �
�Untitled Treatise on Revelation,” section 1.1a, www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00136.

  36. Newton, “Extract from the Untitled Treatise on Revelation,” section 1.1. www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00135.

  37. “Rules for Methodizing the Apocalypse,” Rule 9, qtd. in Manuel, Religion of Isaac Newton, 49.

  38. Newton, “Two Incomplete Treatises on Prophecy,” bk. 1, chap. 1, www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00005.

  39. Newton, “An Account of the Empires of the Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, According to the Descriptions Given of Them by Daniel,” in “Four Draft Chapters on Prophecy,” www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00367.

  40. Manuel, Religion of Isaac Newton, 95.

  41. Newton, “Words for Interpreting the Rules and Language in Scripture,” and “The Proof,” in “Untitled Treatise on Revelation” section 1.1, www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00135.

  42. Newton, “The Proof,” in “Untitled Treatise on Revelation,” www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00135.

  43. Manuel, Religion of Isaac Newton, 87.

  44. Flaubert, Temptation of Saint Anthony, 27.

  45. Frye, The Great Code, 176–77.

  46. Newton, “Of the Vision of the Four Beasts,” chap. 4 in Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00198.

  47. Smoley, “2012 and the Annoying Persistence of Time.”

  48. Frye, The Great Code, 223.

  49. Goff, “The Millennial Scientist.”

  50. Newton, Observations, chap. 1, www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00209.

  51. Westfall, Never at Rest, 328–29.

  52. Westfall, Never at Rest, 329.

  CHAPTER THREE. NEWTON’S GOD

  1. Ellis, Jesus, King of Edessa.

  2. Haycock, William Stukeley, 196–97; see also MacCulloch, Christianity, 748.