Isaac Newton (15 page)

Like no other experimenter of his time, alchemist or chemist, he weighed his chemicals precisely, in a balance scale.
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Obsessed as always with the finest degrees of measurement, he recorded weights to the nearest quarter of a grain. He measured time, too; here, a precise unit was an eighth of an hour. But measurement never replaced sensation: as his experiments fumed, he touched and sniffed and tasted the slimes and liquors that emerged.

He probed for the processes of life and death: vegetation and, a special case, putrefaction, which produces a “blackish
rotten fat substance” and exhales matter into fumes.
Nothing can be changed from what it is without putrefaction
, he wrote in haste, in his microscopic scrawl. First nature putrefies, then it generates new things.
All things are corruptible. All things are generable
. And so the world continually dies and is reborn. These exhalations, and mineral spirits, and watery vapors, generate a rising air and buoy up the clouds: “so high as to loos their gravity.”
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This is very agreeable to natures proceedings to make a circulation of all things. Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable, draws in æthereall breath for its dayly refreshment and vital ferment.… This is the subtil spirit which searches the most hiden recesses of all grosser matter which enters their smallest pores and divides them more subtly then any other materiall power what ever.

Driving this cycle of death and life, inspiring this circulatory world, must be some active spirit—nature’s universal agent, her secret fire. Newton could not but identify this spirit with light itself—and light, in turn, with God. He marshaled reasons. All things, in the fire, can be made to give off light. Light and heat share a mutual dependence. No substance so subtly pervades all things as light. He felt this in the depth of his being.

“Noe heat is so pleasant & beamish as the suns,” he wrote.

Through his alchemical study shines a vision of nature as life, not machine. Sexuality suffused the language of alchemy. Generation came from seed and copulation;
principles were male (Mercury) and female (Venus). Then again:

these two mercuries are the masculine and feminine semens … fixed and volatile, the Serpents around the Caduceus, the Dragons of Flammel. Nothing is produced from masculine or feminine semen alone.… The two must be joined.
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From the seeds, the seminal virtues, came the fire and the soul. If alchemy was the closest Newton came to a worldly exploration of sexuality, it crossed paths with a theological quest as well. To alchemists the transmutation of metals meant a spiritual purification. It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. Theology joined alchemy as the chief preoccupation of Newton’s middle decades.

The new mechanical philosophers, striving to create a science free of occult qualities, believed in matter without magic—inanimate brute matter, as Newton often called it. The virtuosi of the Royal Society wished to remove themselves from charlatans, to build all explanations from reason and not miracles. But magic persisted. Astronomers still doubled as astrologers; Kepler and Galileo had trafficked in horoscopes.
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The magician, probing nature’s secrets, served as a template for the scientist. “Do you believe then,” Nietzsche asked two centuries later, “that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?”

Descartes had gone to great lengths to purify his scheme, substituting mechanical (but imaginary) vortices for hidden (but real) forces like magnetism. Newton was rebelling against Descartes, and nowhere more fiercely than in the realm of the very small. The philosophers stood further removed from atoms than from the stars. Atoms remained a fancy, invisible to human sight. The forces governing heavenly bodies were invisible too, but ready to be inferred from a mathematical treatment of the accumulating data. For any practitioner of chemistry or alchemy, one question loomed: what made particles cohere in the first place?
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What caused inert atoms to stick together, to form minerals and crystals and—even more wonderfully—plants and animals? The Cartesian style was recklessly ad hoc, Newton thought. It offered a different mechanical explanation for every new phenomenon: one for air, another for water, another for vinegar, yet another for sea salt—“and so of other things: your Philosophy will be nothing else than a system of Hypotheses.”
²⁰
Newton wanted a universal cause.

As with the question of light’s true nature, he chose a narrow rhetorical path: veering past the question of whether his program was or was not fundamentally mechanical, all reduced to particles and forces. Of light he had said, “Others may suppose it multitudes of unimaginable small & swift Corpuscles of various sizes, springing from shining bodies at great distances, one after another, but yet without any sensible interval of time, & continually urged forward by a Principle of motion.”
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For the rest:

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne.…

Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. Dry powders refused to cohere. Flies walked on water. Heat radiated through a vacuum. Metallic particles impregnated mercury. Mere thought caused muscles to contract and dilate. There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them.

When he was not stoking his furnaces and stirring his crucibles, he was scrutinizing his growing hoard of alchemical literature. By the century’s end, he had created a private
Index chemicus
, a manuscript of more than a hundred pages, comprising more than five thousand individual references to writings on alchemy spanning centuries. This, along with his own alchemical writing, remained hidden long after his death.

10
 
Heresy, Blasphemy, Idolatry

T
HE FATHERLESS MAN
, the fellow of the college named Trinity, turned to Christian theology with the same sleepless fervor he brought to alchemy. He started a notebook, writing Latin headings atop the folios: Life of Christ; Miracles of Christ; Passion, Descent, and Resurrection. Some topics remained forever blank; some filled and then overflowed with intense, scholarly, and troubled notes. The topics that most absorbed his interest were the relation of God and Christ, the father and the son, and most of all,
De Trinitate
, Of the Trinity.
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Here he swerved into heresy. He abjured this central dogma of his religion: three persons in one Godhead, holy and undivided. He denied the divinity of Jesus and of the Holy Ghost.

England’s universities were above all else instruments of Christianity, and at each step in his Cambridge career Newton swore oaths avowing his faith. But in the seventh year of his fellowship, 1675, a further step would be required: he would take holy orders and be ordained to the Anglican clergy, or he would face expulsion. As the time approached, he realized that he could no longer affirm his orthodoxy. He would not be able to take a false oath. He prepared to resign.
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He believed in God, not as a matter of obligation but in the warp and weft of his understanding of nature. He believed in God eternal and infinite; a living and powerful Lord holding sway over all things; omnipresent, in bodies and filling
the space that is empty of body
.
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He believed in God as immovable—and this belief fused with his vision, still not quite defined, of absolute space.
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Newton’s God had established the rules by which the universe operates, a handiwork that humans must strive to know. But this God did not set his clockwork in motion and abandon it.

He is omnipresent not only
virtually
but also
substantially.… In
him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him.… He is
always
and everywhere.… He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.
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If God was immutable, religion was not.
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Close study fed both his faith and his heresy. He researched and wrote the history of the church again and again. He read the Scriptures literally and indulged a particular fascination with prophecy, which he saw as complex symbolism to be unraveled and interpreted. He considered this a duty. He set down a catalogue of fifteen rules of interpretation and seventy figures of prophecy. He sought the facts, dates, and numbers. He calculated and then recalculated the time of the Second Coming, which he understood to be the restoration of primitive uncorrupted Christianity. He studied in detail the description of the Temple of Jerusalem, a structure of “utmost simplicity and harmony of all its proportions,”
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and tried to reconstruct its floor plan from the long, rambling algorithms of the Hebrew Book of Ezekiel—

So he measured the length thereof, twenty cubits; and the breadth, twenty cubits, before the temple: and he said unto me, This is the most holy place. After he measured the wall of the house, six cubits; and the breadth of every side chamber, four cubits, round about the house on every side. And the side chambers were three, one over another, and thirty in order.…

—an intricate puzzle in prose, another riddle to be deciphered. He struggled to work out the length of the ancient cubit. There seemed to be a message meant for him.

And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, shew them the form of the house,… and all the forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the laws thereof: and write it in their sight
.

The very existence of the Bible in English—long opposed by the church establishment and finally authorized only a generation before Newton’s birth—had inspired the Puritan cause. Vernacular versions of the Bible encouraged the laity to look into the texts and make their own interpretations. Scholars applied the new philosophical tools to Scripture. Anyone could pursue biblical inquiry as a self-directed enterprise; many tried to distinguish the pure Gospel from its medieval accretions. Ancient controversies came back to life. Newton was studying no less than the history of worship. He compared the Scriptures in the new English translation and in the ancient languages; he collected Bibles in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French. He sought out and mastered the writings of the early fathers of the church: saints and martyrs, Athanasius and Arius, Origen, author of the
Hexapla
, Eusebius of Caesarea and Epiphanius of Constantia,
and dozens more. He embroiled himself in the great controversy that tore at Christendom through the fourth century, at Nicaea and Constantinople.

The Trinity was a mystery. It defied rational explanation. It rested on a paradox that could be neither comprehended nor demonstrated: that the Son is fully human and fully divine. As a human Christ does not understand his divinity all at once. Nonetheless he is of the same being,
homoousious
, as the Father. One God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the early fourth century, Arius, an ascetic churchman in Alexandria, led a rebellion against this doctrine. He taught that God alone is fully divine and immutable; that the Son was created, subordinate, and subject to growth and change. For this heresy Arius was excommunicated and condemned. His writings were burned. But enough survived to persuade Newton, brooding over them a millennium later, that the Trinitarians had carried out a fraud upon Christianity. The fraud had been perfected by monks and popes. The word
trinity
never appears in the New Testament. For explicit foundation in Scriptures, the orthodox looked to the First Epistle of John: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” Only the King James Version had the last phrase.
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Newton’s critical reading persuaded him that the original texts had been deliberately debased in support of false doctrine—a false infernal religion.
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