FIRE AND GOLD

William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s 'Secret Fire', Princeton University Press, 2019.

As most readers of this site will know, Isaac Newton was obsessed with alchemy. He devoted thirty years of his life to it and left over a million words – notebooks, commentaries on alchemical texts and unpublished treatises – on his quest for the philosophers’ stone (and the ‘philosophical wine’, which also had the power of transmutation but which you don’t hear so much about it, even though it sounds a lot more interesting).

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It’s also widely known that this side of his life and work was long airbrushed out of the picture in order to portray Newton as the prototype, or even archetype, of the modern scientist. From the very first biography, by Newton’s friend William Stukeley, his alchemical research was downplayed as an idle diversion from his serious scientific endeavours, which William R. Newman calls ‘a direct inversion of the truth.’

For the next century biographers ignored the alchemy entirely. It wasn’t until 1855 that one made a brief, embarrassed mention of it. But the auctioning of Newton’s papers by Sotheby’s in the 1930s brought out just how many of them were devoted not only to alchemy but to other ‘irrational’ esoteric and religious subjects, leading to a rethink about the balance between the two sides of his intellectual life, and prompting John Maynard Keynes’ oft-quoted description of Newton as the ‘last of the magicians.’ His ‘occult’ interests were now acknowledged but a heavy line was drawn between them and his science, with his alchemical work placed firmly on the occult side.

Then, from the 1960s and gathering momentum over the next thirty years, that line became increasingly blurred, with Newton scholars recognising that the science and magic couldn’t be so rigidly compartmentalised. This trend culminated in the works of Richard Westfall and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, who argued that Newton’s application of principles from, particularly, the Hermetic/Neoplatonic tradition directly influenced his scientific theories, mostly notably that of gravity. As Lynn Picknett and I summed it up in The Forbidden Universe, Newton didn’t make his world-changing discoveries despite his occult beliefs, but because of them.

The result was, as Newman writes, "the view that Newton’s theory of gravity owed a heavy debt to alchemy has become canonical in the popular literature." But in this immensely scholarly work Newman, Distinguished Professor of the History of Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University, challenges that canon, writing of Dobbs and Westfall that "their embrace of the Keynesian perspective could at times exert its own smothering grip on their critical judgment."

Well, he challenges it up to a point. It’s not actually the influence of the esoteric on the science that Newman disputes, but which category the alchemy belongs in. He’s arguing for the redrawing of the old line – but with alchemy now on the ‘science’ side.

He bases his case on the observation that in all those million words Newton never related alchemy to his religious and esoteric beliefs – his ‘heterodox, Antitrinitarian Christianity’ and belief in an ancient wisdom (prisca sapientia) that had been transmitted down the ages in the occult traditions – nor, for that matter, did he ever explicitly apply those beliefs to alchemy: the man himself drew the line, keeping them ‘rigorously distinct’. Newman also points out that in his attempts to decipher the complex symbolism and codes of alchemical texts Newton relied entirely on his reason, for example never looking to his dreams for inspiration as many other aspiring adepts did.

So, Newman isn’t necessarily arguing that Newton’s esoteric beliefs didn’t influence his scientific theories such as gravity, just that in nearly all cases the influence didn’t come from alchemy. (His discovery of the composite nature of white light and ‘shell theory’ of matter do seem to owe something to alchemical principles.) Which is a relief, as Lynn and I don’t have to rewrite The Forbidden Universe.

Newman does, though, attribute the massive self-confidence (many would put it considerably more strongly than that), which enabled Newton, in his Principia, to challenge so many accepted and long-held ideas about the laws of nature, to his "awareness of his special status as a novitiate in the fraternity of the adepts."

Part of the reason for Newman’s re-evaluation is that "the once popular notion that alchemy was inherently unscientific… has been largely debunked by historians of science over the last three decades." Historians no longer make the distinction between early modern chemistry and alchemy. For this reason, Newman follows the current convention of using the sixteenth-century term ‘chymistry’ to cover both.

His 500-page examination of Newton’s chymistry is by far the most in-depth and exhaustive (and at times exhausting) study there’s been - perhaps can be - having been 15 years in years in the making and benefiting from two developments that have helped Newman overcome difficulties that constrained previous scholarship.

The first is the digitisation of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts by Indiana University’s Chymistry of Isaac Newton project (www.chymistry.org), of which Newman is the general editor, which has made it considerable easier to dig into those writings, for example to search for words, terms and symbols, a particularly valuable ability when trying to decipher the ‘highly idiosyncratic’ codenames (Decknamen) behind which Newton, like any self-respecting alchemist, concealed the names of the materials he worked with.

The second is Newman’s embracing of the new, literally hands-on methodology of ‘experimental history’, turning to the laboratory to reproduce Newton’s chymical experiments and to identify the substances hidden by his Decknamen by trying different candidates until he gets the same results reported by Newton.

These approaches, plus a lot of painstaking detective work, have enabled Newman to go deeper into Newton’s chymistry than previously possible. They have also allowed him to put together a more precise narrative for Newton’s thirty-year quest for the secret of chrysopoeia – gold-making – something that has always been problematic given that a great many of his manuscripts are undated. As a result, Newman has been able to correct many errors and misconceptions in the standard account, such as the belief that Newton abandoned his alchemical research when he was appointed Warden and later Master of the Royal Mint.

Newman puts Newton’s endeavours in the context of the alchemy of his time, which centred on the figure of the adept and the "isolated and problematic position" they held in sixteenth century society: "Forced to remain anonymous and yet constrained by their very status as a divine elect devoted to the good of mankind, they were required to distribute their secret wisdom with the utmost care" – hence the obscurity of their writings, using a variety of techniques to both reveal and conceal, which would-be adepts like Newton were required to decipher as part of their own self-initiation.

Newman then traces the development of Newton’s "decades-long chrysopoetic quest," arguing that it began at an earlier stage of his studies than previous scholars have thought. Interestingly, Newman identifies key ideas and concepts of Newton’s chymistry as not deriving from magic-oriented medieval alchemy but from ideas about how metals and ores originate within the earth – processes that the alchemist aspired to replicate – which were developed in the ‘protoindustrial revolution of mining and metallurgy’ that had spread out from central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The common belief of miners then was that "metals grew underground like giant, subterranean trees"; if nothing else, an arresting image.

Newman painstakingly reconstructs Newton’s reasoning from the surviving documents, showing how he synthesised various sources in his struggle to interpret the secrets of the adepts, sometimes abandoning as dead ends lines of enquiry to which he’d devoted years, and how his ideas evolved about how individual processes worked, both in nature and in the laboratory.

There’s an examination of the influence on Newton of other chymists, such as Robert Boyle, and of works by those believed to be adepts, such the ‘American philosopher’ George Starkey, who wrote under the name Eirenaeus Philalethes, and Johann de Monte-Snyders, a wandering adept who roamed Germany and what is now Slovenia in the 1660s and was credited with several successful demonstrations of transmutation. Snyders’ books were, Newman shows, the main influence on Newton’s laboratory work.

As well as some rather ‘shadowy’ interactions Newton had with other alchemists, Newman looks at his two long-term collaborations, first with the Swiss Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in the early 1690s and, a decade later, with William Yworth (one of the first distillers of gin in England) who Newton retained to carry out alchemical experiments for him while he was busy running the Mint.

Incidentally, Newman challenges, if not debunks, the conventional belief that a breakdown that Newton suffered in 1693 was due to a rift with Fatio, implying an out-of-character emotional attachment to the younger Swiss. Newman shows that in fact they remained in contact, attributing the breakdown rather to sheer overwork.

Newton the Alchemist offers many new perspectives on our understanding of Newton and the wider subject of the theory and practice of early modern alchemy. It certainly isn’t a light read, in every sense – the book is as weighty as a bar of alchemical gold. There’s an incredible amount of detail, as Newman takes the reader through every twist and turn of his struggles to decode Newton’s Decknamen and symbols, and to identify the sources from which he drew his ideas, teasing every scrap of information he can from Newton’s obscure and voluminous writings, as well as every step in his practical reconstructions of Newton’s laboratory work. Sometimes reading it felt like an alchemical initiation in itself. But as Newman writes, "no one ever said that alchemy was easy" – true both of the practice itself and of its study. 

• Clive Prince.