archive.fo/2024.08.29/https://www.academia.edu/1842210/Isaac_Newtons_Magical_Enlightenment

Werrett – The Magical Enlightenment of Isaac Newton 3 Newton would probably have become an ordained priest if he had not held this belief, a belief that he spent his whole life exploring. Furthermore, Newton’s rejection of the Trinity goes a long way in explaining his scientific opinions. It meant that he placed a great deal of emphasis on the will of God in making the world operate, and it was in order to show how God exercised His will in the world, that Newton turned to natural philosophy. Newton approached nature as a kind of book revealing God’s plan and action in the world. He used biblical studies and natural philosophy to learn about this plan. He also used alchemy. Biblical studies revealed how God had acted in history, whereas alchemy revealed how God might have shaped the nature of matter in the universe. In a makeshift laboratory built outside his rooms in Cambridge, Newton spent many years at the furnace, conducting hundreds of alchemical experiments, whose nature we are only just beginning to appreciate. Alchemy, of course, is seen today as a quintessential folly of the past, as alchemists fooled people into believing that they could transmute base metals into gold. In fact, while transmutation was certainly the goal of some dubious alchemists, alchemy could mean a lot of different things in the seventeenth century. It could mean distilling alcohol or preparing medicines. It could mean making scents and perfumes, or assaying ores to find their metal content. It was by no means all mystical and obscure. But Newton’s alchemy was pretty mystical. He wasn’t looking for gold, but he believed in transmutation as a way to reveal divine secrets. The secrets which alchemy revealed to Newton were extremely powerful. Alchemy showed how God acted as a kind of cosmic chemist, using a special substance that Newton called the “vegetative spirit” to imbue life into matter in the cosmos. Following his interest in the ancients, Newton took from the ancient Stoics the idea of a pneuma or fiery spirit pervading the universe. And this vegetative spirit, Newton concluded, came from the stars and was brought to earth in comets, which crashed into the earth and released the vegetative spirit, which then got into the soil and made plants grow, which fed animals, and so was responsible for all of life. But the big question then became, how did God get this to happen? How did God manage the motions of comets in the solar system to circulate the vegetative spirit? So this leads to a more familiar, more scientific question – another way of putting this is to ask what is the mechanism that drives things around the sun? And that is exactly what Werrett – The Magical Enlightenment of Isaac Newton 4 Newton’s Principia and the idea of universal gravitation answer. Universal gravitation and Newton’s laws of motion supplied him with the means to explain how God circulated his life-giving cosmic spirits in the universe. Religion, alchemy and natural philosophy were thus all part of the same project and different sides of the same coin for Newton – he didn’t have one foot in the past and one in the future - it all fits together in a single project. The ancients provided clues to divine truths, chronology and biblical studies revealed God’s action on earth, alchemy showed how God made matter and life, and natural philosophy revealed the mechanisms to make this happen on a cosmic scale. There was one more thing too. If gravitation was true, Newton calculated that the planets and comets would ultimately be attracted together until they all fell into the sun. It would be no less than the end of the world. But God, Newton reckoned, would redeem the world by intervening and setting everything right again, starting a new cycle in the life of the earth (and by the way he also thought the earth was alive). So gravitation then solved the key problem for Newton – how to show that God was constantly exerting His will in the universe, and not just designing it and setting it going like a clock. God continually intervened to reform the universe and this demonstrated His will in action and proved his omnipotence. It all confirmed Newton’s antitrinitarian belief. God, said Newton, was “Lord Pantocrator” – a unique, all-powerful being. Newton’s successors did not ignore the mystical and religious parts of his work – far from it. In the eighteenth century, Newton was as celebrated for his biblical writing as for his science, and Newton’s obsession with the ancients led to a new emphasis on antiquarianism among British scientists that lasted a generation. A fascination with the ancients, for example, provided the inspiration for founding the British Museum in the 1750s. Newton’s alchemical views, his interest in comets as divine instruments, and his religious beliefs also influenced many followers. A picture from 1752 celebrating Newton by the antiquarian William Stukeley shows comets and a many- breasted life-giving nature. In fact, the triumverate of science, religion, and antiquarianism remained a part of British science and culture well into the nineteenth century, and it was only in France that this set of pursuits came to be seen as separate and even in conflict at the time of Werrett – The Magical Enlightenment of Isaac Newton 5 the French Revolution. In the decades preceding the Revolution, French philosophers wishing to condemn the Catholic church in France reformulated Newton as a champion of reason against superstition. They downplayed or ignored Newton’s religious writings and motivations, and instead represented him as a much more secular thinker. The physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace reworked Newton’s system of the world so that the exercise of God’s will to restore the system was not part of it, and it was this image of Newton and Newtonian science that was then spread around Europe with Napoleon in the early nineteenth century. It is this image of a rational, secular Newton that we inherit today, but it is not an image that Newton himself would have recognized. Further Reading: Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (Macmillan, 2002) Rob Iliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007)