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 obvious product of a fool and a knave.'

But the full extent of Newton's interest in the subject became clear only when the Cambridge University committee which examined the Portsmouth Manuscripts published their report in 1888, and even more fully when the alchemical manuscripts were described in detail in the catalogue of the Sotheby sale of 1936 which was to scatter them all over the world.² It was now revealed that, besides the 1,300,000 words on the theological and Biblical topics, there were extant about 650,000 words on alchemy, almost wholly in Newton's own hand.³

It seems fair to say that historians who have discussed Newton's alchemical studies since Brewster have tended to adopt diametrically opposed views about their significance. L. T. More, in his 1934 biography of Newton, claimed:

The fact of the matter is, Newton was an alchemist, and his major interest in chemistry, in his earlier years, centered on the possibility of transmuting metals.

Lord Keynes, who helped to save a great many of the alchemical manuscripts from dispersion at the 1936 sale, commented in 1947 (in what has been called "an unfortunately memorable phrase")⁵ that Newton, who had left behind him an enormous mass of alchemical material that was "wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value," was to be seen as "not the first of the age of reason," but "the last of the magicians."⁶ After a more searching and careful survey, the historian of alchemy and early chemistry, F. Sherwood Taylor, reaffirmed More's judgement in 1956:

He conducted alchemical experiments, he read widely and universally in alchemical treatises of all types, and he wrote alchemy, not like Newton, but like an alchemist.

There are obvious difficulties in accepting such a verdict. Not only does it radically challenge our image of Newton as the greatest of the early modern scientists who broke the spell both of scholasticism and of the Renaissance pseudo-sciences in the study of nature. It also raises in an acute form the problem of reconciling his supposedly alchemical commitments with his published views on chemical topics. However strange Newton's views on Biblical prophecy may now appear, they presumably have little relevance for understanding his scientific work; but it seems inconceivable that there should be no connection between his alchemical studies and the reasonably coherent chemical philosophy which can be reconstructed from his printed works. The historians who have described Newton as an "alchemist" have done little to link that belief with his "official" science. L. T. More suggested that Newton was searching for some unifying principle that would connect all chemical actions. Sherwood Taylor pointed to Newton's attempts to explain gravitation, electrical and magnetic actions, and animal motion in terms of an aethereal medium, and saw here a connection with alchemy, since "a great part of alchemy is concerned with that universal medium, the philosopher's mercury."

Such suggestions have seemed to others to raise more problems than they set out to solve. Professor and Mrs. Rupert Hall have commented that to identify the aether of the "General Scholium" with the "Philosophical Mercury" of the alchemists, instead of making Newton's thinking more comprehensible, makes it less so.' Since that view prefaces their own valuable and pioneering study (1958) of the neglected notebook of Newton in which he had actually recorded many of his chemical (or alchemical?) experiments, it is surprising that their conclusions do not, at first sight, seem to conflict with L. T. More's and Sherwood Taylor's assessment. They state that most of Newton's experiments on metals aimed at discovering ways in which metals could be made more volatile, as well as at preparing alloys of low melting and boiling points. Sal Ammoniac was a key ingredient in both sorts of experiments. The Halls admit that the alchemists of the time shared these aims. The art of changing volatile to fixed had "an alchemical significance." Though Newton never explained his interest in alloys of a low melting point, it was probably connected with the alchemical search for the "philosopher's mercury." Again, Newton's preference for using indeterminate ores rather than smelted metal was perhaps connected with the alchemical idea that the metallic mineral was alive and fertile, while smelted metal was dead and inert.

But the Halls insist that these striking similarities must not be taken to mean that Newton aimed at the same result—the Stone and the Elixir—as the alchemists. They point to his careful techniques, keen attention to measurement, and "rational" interpretation of alchemical terms and symbols as proof of Newton's "rational" approach to alchemy. Newton's work on speculum metals for his reflecting telescope perhaps provoked questions in his mind about the structure of metals and alloys. Besides this accidental stimulus, he may have found metals extremely suitable subjects for the study of structural composition. And when one studied metallurgical chemistry in the seventeenth century, where else would one turn to than the alchemist. The notebook itself provides no clues about Newton's purpose. But (the Halls contend) except as a repository of certain valuable facts, alchemy had nothing to offer Newton: it was not a variant natural philosophy, but merely a theory of metals plus the operations necessary for its realisation, with a lump of gold as the end-product.⁹

However much such a view of Newton's alchemical studies may seem to fit the Newton we know from the Principia and the Opticks, it is not free from many difficulties. First of all, the alchemical excerpts, considered both in respect to the choice of authors and of topics, do not really support the idea that Newton was merely looking for chemical and metallurgical information. A large number of extracts are descriptions of alchemical processes; others relate to such alchemical topics as the different sorts of stones created by the alchemists and the fantastic powers they conferred on the possessor; and a whole class of extracts (mostly from the alchemist Michael Maier) is an elaborate discussion of the alchemical significance of pagan mythology. Moreover, in a number of his own manuscript compositions, Newton employs alchemical beliefs in a matter of fact way in his discussion of the problem of generation in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms: for example, in a manuscript now in the Bumdy Library, which discusses the properties of the "two Elixirs" and of the Alkahest.¹⁰

Secondly, Newton himself, to judge from an early indication of his opinion, did not regard alchemy merely as an Goldmachenkunst. A rare occasion, when (to use his own words) he "shot his bolt" about alchemy, was in a letter to Henry Oldenberg (then Secretary of the Royal Society) on 26th April 1676, commenting on a paper by Robert Boyle in the Philosophical Transactions on the "incalescence" of gold and mercury. Boyle had offered a corpuscular explanation of the process, and Newton offered an alternative one, in terms of the size and mechanical actions of the particles. But he went on to commend Boyle for concealing some parts of the process, since it was

possibly an inlet to something more noble, and not to be communicated without immense dammage to ye world if there be any verity in ye Hermetick writers …¹¹

To discover its true significance, Boyle should hold his "high silence" and reflect on his true experiment or consult someone who really understood what Boyle had talked about,

that is, of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other things beside ye transmutation of metalls (if those great pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand.

The letter is laced with caution about the claims of the alchemists, but the hint that Boyle did not really comprehend what manner of things he was meddling with, recurs in Newton's later correspondence. These remarks, together with the evidence of the manuscripts, reinforce a feeling that it is far easier to attribute Boyle's interest in alchemical authors to a search for valuable information than Newton's.

Newton's comment that the wide dissemination of alchemical secrets could result in "immense dammage to ye world" may refer merely to the monetary and social consequences of easy transmutation; but he hinted that more was involved than transmutation. In the alchemical works he himself studied, success in alchemy was said to open the gates to knowledge of all the secrets of the universe. His contemporary, Elias Ashmole, introducing the collection which Newton constantly studied, said that making gold was

scarce any intent of the ancient Philosophers, and lowest use the Adepti made of the Materia. For they being lovers of Wisdom more than worldly Wealth, drove at higher and more Excellent Operations: And certainly He to whom the whole Course of Nature Iyes open, rejoyceth not so much that he can make Gold and Silver, or the Divells to become subject to him, as that he sees the Heavens open, the Angells of God Ascending and Descending, and that his own Name is fairely written in the Book of Life …

In briefe, by the true and various uses of the Philosopher's Prima Materia … the perfection of Liberal l Sciences are made known, the whole Wisdome of Nature may be grasped: And …There are yet hid greater things than these, for we have seen but few of his Workes.¹²

In pointing out the difficulties of what its expositors see as a more rational interpretation of Newton's alchemical studies, I may seem to have slid back to viewing him as a convinced alchemist. But it is to be noted that even in the letter to Oldenburg in which he extols the knowledge of the Hermetic philosophers, Newton couches his explanation of Boyle's process in strictly corpuscular and mechanical terms. We seem to be impaled here on the horns of a dilemma: how could the rational and scientific Newton, who obviously interpreted alchemical processes not in mystical or traditional alchemical terms, but within a mechanical framework, have placed any credence in their larger and wilder claims?

I should like to suggest that the relation between Newton's alchemical studies and his "official" science becomes clearer if we examine the assumptions guiding two other sorts of studies which absorbed a great deal of his attention. These are, first, his Biblical studies,¹³ especially of the prophetic books of the Bible; and second, his studies of ancient natural philosophy, undertaken in the 1690's in connection with the revised second edition of the Principia. Underlying both sorts of studies, for Newton, was the assumption that truth—whether about the unfolding course of history or the true system of the world—was anciently given, but in a veiled and enigmatic form to conceal it from the vulgar. The prefiguring of future events in Scripture would become clear only when those events had come to pass, for their sole function was to demonstrate the Providence which guided the course of history; that was the task which Newton attempted in his study of ancient history. Similarly, the fact that the ancients had possessed knowledge of the true physical system of the world could only be seen when that system had been recovered, on the basis of a rigorous inductive and experimental method. So convinced was Newton that this was so, that he intended at the time to add classical annotations in the second edition to show that the key propositions of the Principia were well known to some of the ancients; indeed, he argues in elaborate detail that Pythagoras must have known the law of universal gravitation. What Newton was employing was a characteristic Renaissance tactic, the idea of a prisca sapientia which had served to legitimize the concern of the Florentine Platonists with the Hermetic magical works, and later, from the end of the sixteenth century, to remove the tinge of atheism from atomic doctrines by attributing them to a certain Moschus, who, many classical scholars held, was none other than Moses himself; and Newton's contemporaries at Cambridge, the Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, used the same tactic to present the Mechanical Philosophy as no more than the restoration of an ancient Mosaic theology-cum-natural philosophy which had become separated after Pythagoras.

Now the idea of a pristine knowledge of nature, delivered in a mysterious text—the "Tabula Smaragdina"—and to be unravelled by the practical "work of the fire", aided by the works of the succession of masters through the ages who had penetrated the secret, is central to alchemy. Expanding earlier hints and influenced by a Renaissance mythographic tradition, the 17th century German alchemist, Michael Maier, had greatly extended the range of alchemically "relevant" materials by arguing that the whole of Greek and Roman mythology was a veiled representation of alchemical secrets.

In view of his later attitude, it is probably significant that even during his last year at school at Grantham, Newton owned and annotated a work expounding the ethical, historical, and scientific significance of the fables narrated by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. 4 When he came to Cambridge he imbibed the mechanical philosophy during his undergraduate years, not only from the works of Descartes and other continental masters, but also from those of Henry More, where it was presented as the rediscovery of a most ancient philosophy. The earliest known indication of Newton's alchemical interest is the letter he wrote to his friend Francis Aston in 1669, and the manuscript evidence makes it certain that the transmutations he asked Aston to investigate during his travels are derived from the works of Michael Maier. Newton's continuous fascination with Maier's works is evident from the long extracts he made from them, and from the many citations in the various alchemical indices which Newton compiled. Newton's own chemical experiments began probably at this time, and continued at least until 1696.¹⁵

As his letter to Oldenburg in 1676 hinted, Newton did not regard alchemy merely as the search for transmutation; much deeper things were involved in it. The symbolic and enigmatic from in which alchemists had expressed themselves was essential to the nature of the art. His views on alchemy have, in fact, a much less modern ring than those of Robert Boyle. Boyle probably influenced Newton profoundly in his belief that the mechanical philosophers should concern themselves much more closely with chemical phenomena, in part by studying the experiments reported by the best of the chemical authors. Boyle did not wish to dismiss the possibility that some alchemical "adepts" may have been in possession of the secret of transmutation, for the corpuscular philosophy implied the transmutability of matter.¹⁶ But he was emphatic in asserting that these valuable results were only an accidental byproduct of the fact that the alchemists had sought the Stone and the Elixir by practical laboratory operations. Certainly, their confused and false theories had nothing to offer to the mechanical philosopher, and were based on competing element-theories which had all now been refuted. Most of the authors whom Boyle himself discussed in this connection were those who had renounced the search for transmutation in favour of the search for arcana and "Quintessences" useful in medicine: Paracelsus and followers of his tria prima like Duchesne and Beguin; Sala; Sennert; Libavius; and especially Helmont.

None of these particular authors appear in the lists of the best chemical authors compiled at various times by Newton. His interest was in the great masters of the alchemical succession, from the Hermes Trismegistus whom he took to have lived in the time of the Patriarchs down to contemporaries like the Theodorus Mundanus, whose alchemical views were published by Edmund Dickinson in 1686.¹⁷ More than half of the authors he most frequently consulted were then believed to have lived between the time of Moses and the thirteenth century. Those in whom Boyle was especially interested do not appear in Newton's lists, presumably because they did not concern themselves primarily with the "Great Work" (although Helmorit is studied for his "Alkahest"). The extant Newtonian alchemical manuscripts consist almost wholly of extracts from alchemical works, and there can be no doubt that most of them deal with the processes involved in making the Stone. However, these works insisted at the same time that the Stone was valued by the true adepti not because it would transmute metals and cure all diseases, but because it would make it possible to understand the greatest secret of nature: the subtle spirit or the "Philosopher's Mercury" which was the source of all activity in the universe. To quote Ashmole again:

… the Power and Vertue is not in Plants, Stones, Minerals &c. (though we sensibly perceive the Effects from them) but 'tis that universal and Allpiercing Spirit, the One operative vertue and immortall Seede of Worldly things, that God in the beginning infused into the Chaos, which is every where Active and still flows through the world in all kindes of things by universall extension, and manifests itself by the aforesaid Productions. Which Spirit a true Artist knowes how-so to handle (though its activity be as it were dul'd and streightly bound up, in the close Prison of Grosse and Earthie bodies) as to take it from Corporeity, free it from Captivity, and let it loose that it may freely worke as it doth in the AEtheriall Bodies.'"

The Hermetic Tablet, the basic text of alchemy, described the operations of this Spirit, and many of Newton's extracts deal with the numerous different forms of activity in the universe in which it was involved.'⁹ It is difficult to understand how, without a conviction that deep truths were concealed in alchemy, Newton should have attached much significance to such ideas, or to have believed (as the Halls contend) that

the profoundly esoteric terminology of alchemy was only an extension of the superficially esoteric language of ordinary chemistry; and similarly that the more recondite experimentation of the former was but an extension of the better-known and clearer experimentation of the latter.²⁰

Boyle, in various places, referred to "the Universal spirit, asserted by some Chymists", as a substitute for or in combination with the tria prima of elements, but implied that it was superfluous, since it would have to be understood in corpuscular terms before it could satisfactorily explain any thing in nature.²¹ Newton's assumptions, on the other hand, imply some sort of dialectic between new inductively- and experimentally-based scientific knowledge and the ancient texts: the rise of the mechanical philosophy made a deeper penetration into the meaning of those texts possible, but did not invalidate the truths they embodied.²² The Aristotelian element-theory was employed, in most part, in the alchemical texts to characterise the various phases of matter, and Newton took over that phraseology in many of his own works; and he characteristically read a deeper meaning into the sulphur-mercury theory, arguing in an early draft of his "De natura acidorum":

Note that what is said by chemists, that everything is made from sulphur and mercury is true, because by sulphur they mean acid, and by mercury they mean earth.²³

If the interpretation that has been offered of the enormous amount of time and labour devoted by Newton to the study of an astonishing variety of alchemical writings and to experiments over several decades is correct, then we must seriously re-examine Sherwood Taylor's suggestion that there is some connection between Newton's various aethereal speculations and the "philosopher's mercury" sought by the alchemists. The alchemical flavour of the aethereal hypotheses presented by Newton in his 1675 letter to Oldenburg and 1679 letter to Boyle has been noted by a number of authors.²⁴ The letter to Oldenburg isprimarily concerned with describing an optical hypothesis, but is prefaced by a long section outlining a wide range of phenomena (including electrical and magnetic actions, chemical phenomena, animal motion, and gravitation) which are explained in terms of an aethereal medium. There can be no doubt that Newton's account offers variations on the Cartesian vortical aether and is strongly influenced by Boyle's model of the "ocean of air".²⁵ But at least three of the themes of these speculations bear a striking resemblance to those he was studying at that time in the alchemical authors. These are: firstly, the creation of all things from aether by condensation, and the idea of a particular spirit within that aether which is contained within the pores of matter as a principle of activity "for the continual uses of nature"; secondly, the continual condensation of that particular spirit by the earth, while the exchange of 'as much matter" sent out in an aerial form from the bowels of the earth sets up a circulation; thirdly, the existence of "sociability" and "unsociability" between various substances through "a secret principle" and action of intermediaries in resolving it.

The first two themes are directly related to the Tabula and its interpretation by alchemical authors. A manuscript commentary on the Tabula in Newton's hand describes how all things were generated from the alchemical chaos or aether, and how that aether ascends into the heavens by sublimations and in time by reiterated sublimations descends to earth—a process which the alchemist must emulate in his own operations. The third theme, that of the secret sympathies and antipathies between various chemical substances, was a basic one in alchemical discussions.²⁶

Newton sought to explain a much wider range of phenomena by his "Spirit" than was usual in alchemical discussions;²⁷ and, of course, there is no analogue in the alchemical writings for his explanation of many of these phenomena in terms of the "mechanical" properties of the aether. But that he was equating the alchemical spiritus with a quasi-Cartesian ether can now be shown much more convincingly by recourse to the Bumdy Library manuscript already cited. In that document Newton considered a favourite alchemical theme, the analogy between generation and maturation in each of the three kingdoms of nature, for the light it cast upon the "vegetation of metals", and, presumably, upon the processes by which the Great Work might be accomplished.

Newton sharply distinguished nature's "vegetable" actions from the "purely mechanical" ones. The former included generation and corruption, the latter gravitation, the tides, "meteors" and "vulgar Chymistry". The reactions of ordinary chemistry may at times seem to human senses "as strange transmutations as those of nature", but they really involved merely the "mechanical coalitions or separations of particles". If vegetation involved something more, then "this difference is vast and fundamental because nothing could ever yet be made without vegetation which nature useth to produce by it", and he significantly included the supposed transmutation of iron into copper as an example.²⁸ What distinguished vegetation from mechanism was the fact that it consisted of an interaction between the aether as an activating principle and the "rudements" or seeds of things, that is "that substance in them that is attained to the fullest degree of maturity that is in that thing". The descent of the aether from the heavens could itself be explained mechanically. Enormous quantities of vapours and airs ascended continually from the earth by "mineral dissolutions and fermentation" and they compressed the aether and finally forced it to descend, illustrating once more that it was "very agreeable to nature's proceedings to make a circulation of all things": "Thus this earth resembles a great animal or rather inanimate vegetable, and draws in aethereal breath for its daily refreshment & vital ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations … And thus a great pt if not all the moles of sensible matter is nothing but AEther congealed & interwoven into various textures whose life depends on that pt of it wch is in a middle state, not wholly distinct & loose from it like ye AEther in wch it swims as in a fluid nor wholly joined & compacted together with it under one form but in some degree condensed [&] united to it & yet remaining of a much more rare texture & subtle disposition & so this seems to be the principle of its acting."

On further reflection Newton concluded that "'tis more probable ye aether is but a vehicle to some more active spt & ye bodies may be concreted of both together, they may imbibe aether well as air in generation & in ye aether ye spt is entangled. This spt is ye body of light because both have a prodigious active principle, both are prodigious workers …"

These remarks do much to clarify Newton's view of alchemy at the time. In the course of developing his thoughts on the "vegetation of metals," he cited the Elixir and the Alkahest, the initially green colour of the Stone and the generation of much air in the Stone's "first solution" as part of his evidence. His identification of the most active part of the aether with light is particularly interesting. The spiritus was regarded by the alchemists as present in all bodies, constituting the principle of their activity. When extracted from substances and concentrated within the Stone, it was often described as being most like light. The spiritus must necessarily be a substance of the finest subtlety since it entered the smallest parts of gross matter and separated them in the processes of generation and maturation, but (in Newton's own words) "not after ye way of common menstruums by rending them violently asunder &c.", but by "a more subtle sweet & noble way of working …" Newton's reflections seem, then, to indicate that Newton may, at least at that time, have conceived the goal of the alchemical quest as the recovery of the body of light itself through practical laboratory operations. Newton had not ceased to speculate on these lines even when he published his Opticks in its second English edition of 1717, and in Query 30 he asked: "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from Particles of Light which enter their Composition? … The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very comfortable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations."²⁹

Newton's thoughts on the aether and the spiritus are made more intelligible when they are viewed against the vicissitudes of the idea of spiritus through the 16th and 17th centuries, and its place in one particular variant of the mechanical philosophy in England. The alchemical spiritus was invoked in natural-philosophical discussions by authors of very different philosophical allegiances. It provided a rationale for nondemonic "natural magic" to the Florentine Platonists and their successors;³⁰ furnished an explanation of the Aristotelian "occult" qualities for Jean Fernel;³¹ and served as an explanatory principle in the works of such innovators as Telesio, Basso, Campanella, and Francis Bacon.³² The "Spagyrick" authors who wished to turn chemical studies away from traditional alchemy and towards medicine often identified the spiritus with particular substances; for example Glauber and the Paracelsians equated it with the "nitro-aerial spirit," unintentionally aiding its identification with familiar substances.³³ So various were the functions assigned to the spiritus, which was itself increasingly regarded as a material fluid, that William Harvey condemned it as the deus ex machina of inferior writers.³⁴

More immediately relevant for studying Newton's ideas is the tactic adopted in 1657 by Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, in his amalgam of Cartesianism and Neo-Platonism. He identified the First and Second Matters of Descartes with the spiritus of the Renaissance Platonists—the spiritus which Ficino had said was the same as the alchemical Fifth Element or Quintessence—in order to avoid the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter.³⁵ A simple identification of the alchemical spiritus and the Cartesian ether will be found, again, with citations to Henry More, in the professedly Cartesian work, Experitnental Philosophy, published by Newton's contemporary, Henry Power in 1664. Power called it "the main (though invisible) Agent in all Natures three Kingdoms Mineral, Vegetal, and Animal."³⁶ They were responsible for fermentation in minerals, vegetation and maturation in plants, and life, sense, and motion in animals; they explained the conjunction of soul and body in man through the mediation of the animal spirits.

Henry More's view of the mechanical philosophy as the restoration of the lost "Mosaic" system of the world seems to have generally influenced Newton, and it is likely that he was equally impressed by More's pointing to the basic similarities between the Neo-Platonic spiritus and the Cartesian aether. Given these assumptions, the alchemical texts would enormously extend the range of materials in which that aether had been discussed and described, and even open the possibility of being able to recover that extremely active substance through laboratory operations. That was not incompatible with devising "mechanically" intelligible explanations of the myriad phenomena which ultimately depended on the action of the aether.

This paper has attempted to outline an approach to Newton's alchemical studies that would avoid the opposing dangers of either isolating them from his total scientific and intellectual labours, or of splitting Newton into irreconcilable "scientific" and "mystical" selves. The changes in Newton's attitude to alchemy, and their bearing on, say, the "cometary spirit" of the Principia, and the "Active Principles" of the Opticks, are problems for future research to clarify. But we cannot even begin to grapple with them unless we take account of a legacy of Renaissance ideas which had not lost their force during Newton's lifetime.

What is particularly impressive, and perhaps vital for understanding the complexities of Newton's own worldview, is the influence of the Renaissance "pristine" concept in Newton's attempts to unify some of the major ideas enshrined in the very different sorts of literature he studied intensively at various periods of his life: the vast labyrinth of alchemy; the theology of the early Church Fathers, especially the Alexandrian Fathers; and the scientific views of the ancients. Historians of ideas have recently begun to explore the recurrence and transformation of such ideas as those of the pneuma, or the teachings of the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, in these different sorts of works.³⁷ The Newtonian manuscripts show that Newton was well aware of these resemblances, and regarded them as proof of the consonance between the truths he had discovered by rigorous scientific procedures and the clues scattered in enigmatic form in very disparate realms of ancient and late-antique thought.

It is true that the approach advocated here demands a significant modification of the conventional view of Newton. Certainly, the labels of "Rationalist," "empiricist," or "mystic" which have been variously applied in this context fail to do justice to the complexities of Newton's thought. In common with the other great natural philosophers of his age, like Descartes, or even more, like Leibniz, Newton strove for a unified solution that would encompass not only the mysteries of celestial and terrestrial physics, but also the perennial religious problems of the relation between the Creator and his universe. These wider endeavours of Newton may appear naively fundamentalist and philosophically unsophisticated when compared, say, with the coherence and majesty of the system of Leibniz. But any total account of Newton's thought must fully consider them. Otherwise, we shall remain wedded to a simplistic view of the rich, strange, complex world of Newton's thought, and harried by problems of interpretation which have usually been met by desperate expedients which recent achievements in the historiography of science, particularly the outstanding work of Walter Pagel,³⁷ should make us extremely wary of adopting.

The "strange seas of thought" over which Isaac Newton voyaged may now seem even stranger than we had suspected. Charting their extent and plumbing their depths will demand a sensitivity and a breadth of contextual knowledge for which Pagel's work has set up almost impossibly high standards.

References

¹ Brewster, Sir David, "Memoirs of the Life, Writings, & Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton ", Edinburg & London, 1855, II, 374-5.

²"A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers Written by or belonging to Sir Isaac Newton … Drawn up by the Syndicate appointed the 6th November 1872", Cambridge, 1888. Catalogue of the Newton Papers, Sotheby's, London, 1936.

³ Estimate by F. Sherwood Taylor, "An Alchemical Work of Sir Isaac Newton", Ambix, V (1956), 60.

⁴ More, L. T., Isaac Newton, A Biography, New York & London, 1934, 158 and 52.

⁵ Boas, Marie, and Hall, A. Rupert, "Newton's Chemical Experiments," Archives internationales d'Histoire des sciences, XI (1958), 113.

⁶ The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (15-19 July 1946), Cambridge, 1947, J. M. Keynes, "Newton, the Man," 32 & 27.

⁷ Taylor, op. cit., 63.

⁸ Halls, 118.

⁹Ibid., 133-152.

¹⁰ The item was listed in the Sotheby Sale Catalogue as No. 516, and begins: "Of natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation."

¹¹ Turnbull, H. W., (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, II, Cambridge, 1960, 1-3; Boyle's paper appeared in Phil. Trans., X (1675/6), 515-33.

¹²Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, London, 1652, Prolegomena, [A4^v] & B2^r.

¹³ Discussed in McGuire, J. E. & Rattansi, P. M., "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan,'" Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London, XXI (1966), 108-143. Cf. Newton on Daniel and the Apocalypse, (ed.) White, W., London, 1922, 305-6.

¹⁴A Descriptive Catalogue of the Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton, New York, 1950, 187-6, records: "Sabinus, Georgius … Ovidii / Metamorphoses, / sev Fabvlae Poeticae: / Earemque Interpretatio / Ethica, Physica et Historica / … ultima editio, 1593, Frankfurt," and on the flyleaf: "Isaci Newtoni / Liber / Octobris 15 / 1659. / praetium -0-1-6," and various marginal notes.

¹⁵ On Newton's interest in alchemy, consult Brewster, More, the Halls, Sherwood Taylor, in works cited supra.; also Forbes, R. J., "Was Newton an alchemist?," Chymia, II (1949), 27-36, and Geoghegan, D., "Some Indications of Newton's attitude towards Alchemy," Ambix, VI (1957), 102-106. Keynes Manuscript 32 at King's College, Cambridge, contains 88 pages of notes in Newton's hands from four works by Maier, totalling about 50,000 words; Maier continued to be cited in the indices Newton compiled in the late 17th century.

¹⁶ See e.g. Boyle, Works, (ed.) Birch, T., 1744, III, 621; cf. the appendix on "the Producibleness of Chymicall Principles" added to the 1680 ed. of the Sceptical Chymist, where Boyle affirms his strong belief in adepts with "among other rare things some Alkahestical or other extraordinarily potent Menstruum," p. [*7'v].

¹⁷ The shortest list among the Keynes MSS. reads: "Best authors: Hermes, Turba, Morien, Artephius, Abraham the Jew and Flammel, Scala, Ripley, Maier, the great Rosary, Chamock, Trevisan, Philalethea, D'espagnet." The longest list, among those grouped in Keynes, M. S. 13, contains 63 works, including Edmund Dickinson's of 1684.

¹⁸ Ashmole, op. cit., 446-7.

¹⁹ An English translation of the Tabula in Newton's hand, as well the Latin text with a commentary, are in Keynes, M. S. 28; cf. in the Bumdy Library MS.: "That vegetation is ye sole effect of a latent spt & that this spt is ye same in all things only discriminated by degrees of maturity …"

²⁰ Halls, op. cit., 151-2.

²¹ Boyle, Works, III, 453.

²² McGuire & Rattansi, op. cit.; in the manuscript discussed there, Newton said that by the fiction of a lion falling out of the moon and stones out of the sun Anaxagoras indicated the gravity of the sun and moon towards the earth, and the force of rotation against gravity, respectively, for "the mystical philosophers by this kind of fiction were wont to adumbrate the doctrines in mystical language." Cf. Newton's note in Keynes MS. 32: "Pythagoras fuit adeptus, (fit ejus metampsychosis cum tinctura lapidis in imperfecta metalla transfertur. fflata (i.e. lapis Philos) non est conedena.)"

²³ Newton, Correspondence, III, 206 and 210.

²⁴ E.G. Löhne, J., in Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, I(1961), 401.

²⁵ Guerlac, Henry, Newton et Epicure, Paris, 1963, 9.

²⁶ Festugiere, P., La revelation d'Hermes Trismegiste, Paris, 1944, I, 233-237.

²⁷ Cf. (ed.) Turnbull, H. W., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, I, Cambridge, 1959, 11 and note 6, 13.

²⁸ Cited from the Dover ed., New York, 1952, 374. In ibid., 405, Newton said that in the observations and queries of the Third Book, he had "only begun the Analysis of what remains to be discovere'd about Light and its Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several things about it, and leaving the Hints to be examin'd and improv'd by the further Experiments and Observations of such as are inquisitive."

²⁹ Walker, D. P., Spiritual and demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London, 1958.

³⁰ Walker, "The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine," Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, XXI (1958).

³¹ Siebeck, H., "Neue beitrage zur entwicklungsgeschichte des Geist-Begriffs," Archivfiir Geschichte der Philosophie, XX (1914), 1-16.

³² Sherwood Taylor, F., "The Idea of the Quintessence," in (ed.) Underwood, E. Ashworth, Science, Medicine and History, London, 1953, I, 247-265.

³³ In the "Excert. alt. ad J. Riolan," 1649, and again in the De generatione (1651), Harvey rejected any attempt to explain vital phenomena by a material cause, and adduced empirical evidence against the presence of the spiritus in physiological cavities. On the sun, the spirit, and the aerial niter in the seventeenth century chemical literature see Allen G. Debus, "The Sun in the Universe of Robert Fludd," Le Soleil a la Renaissoance-Sciences et Mythes, Travaux de l'Institut pour l'etude de la Renaissance et de l'Humanisme, Brussels, 1965, 259-278; "The Paracelsian Aerial Niter," Isis, LV (1964), 43-61.

³⁴ More, Henry, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), B. 2, ch. iv.

³⁵ Power, Henry, Experimental Philosophy in Three Books, London, 1664, "A Digression on Animal Spirits," 61-71; also C. Webster, "Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy," Ambix XIV (1967), 150-78 and Rattansi, Ambix XVI (1969), 173-5.

³⁶ Verbeke, G., L 'Evolution de la doctrine du pneuma, Paris & Louvain, 1945; Festugiere, op. cit. (note 26).

³⁷ See Pagel's remarks in Das Medizinische Weltbild des Paracelsus, seine zussamenhdnge mit Neuplatonismus und Gnosis, Wiesbaden, 1962, 14-16.