Natural Philosophy: Including Mathematics, Optics, And Alchemy | P. M. Rattansi (essay date 1972)
P. M. Rattansi (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: "Newton's Alchemical Studies," in Science, Medicine, and Society in the Renaissance, edited by Allen G. Debus, Science History Publications, 1972, pp. 167-82.
[In the following essay, Rattansi emphasizes that examination of Newton's work in alchemy should not be divorced from the remainder of his scientific work, nor should such examination attemnpt to divide Newton into "irreconcilable 'scientific' and 'mystical' selves."]
Newton's alchemical studies first came to public notice when Brewster published his magisterial biography of Newton in 1855. Brewster was troubled by Newton's obsessive interest in the subject, and confessed that:
we cannot understand how a mind of such power, and nobly occupied with the abstractions of geometry, and the study of the material world, could stoop to be even the copyist of the most contemptible alchemical poetry, and the annotator of a work, the...
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