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Isaac Newton: alchemist and fundamentalist

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Martin Gardner

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Newton had no interest in music or art, and once dismissed poetry as "ingenious fiddle-faddle." He never exercised, had no recreational hobbies, no interest in games, and was so preoccupied with his work that he frequently forgot to eat or would eat standing up to save time. He had few friends, and even to them he was often quarrelsome and vindictive. In one of his letters to John Locke, his best friend among British philosophers, he wrote:

Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with woemen & by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly & would not live I answered twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness.

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Locke wrote back to grant forgiveness, and to express undimmed love and esteem.

Newton seldom credited other scientists with earlier work that had influenced him. Always insistent on getting full credit for his discoveries, he bitterly accused Leibniz, whose metaphysics he despised, of stealing his invention of calculus. It is now known that the two discoveries were independent. Newton's was earlier, but Leibniz had a superior notation.

A few years after the publication of Principia, Newton suffered a massive mental breakdown that took a year or more to overcome. It was marked by severe insomnia, deep depression, amnesia, loss of mental ability, and paranoid delusions of persecution. In recent years a few scholars have suggested he may have suffered from mercurial and other toxic metal poisoning caused by his alchemical experiments. Others have conjectured that throughout his life he was a manic-depressive with alternating moods of melancholy and happy activity. His breakdown was only the worst of such episodes.

When Newton's manuscripts on alchemy were sold in 1936 at a Sotheby auction, the economist John Maynard Keynes was the major buyer. In a brilliant speech on Newton, given at the Royal Society's Newton Tercentenary Celebration in 1947, Keynes spoke of having gone through some million of Newton's words on alchemy and found them "wholly devoid of scientific value." Newton's "deepest instincts were occult, esoteric - with a profound shrinking from the world - a rapt, consecrated, solitary perusing his studies by intense introspection, with a mental endurance perhaps never equaled."

As for Newton's discoveries in mathematics and physics, Keynes believed they resulted less from experiments than from an incredible intuition. Later Newton would dress them up with formal demonstrations and proofs which had little to do with the insights that seemed to enter his head by sheer magic. Keynes put it this way:

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, thought partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was nor the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

Isaac Newton: alchemist and fundamentalist

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Martin Gardner

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