Out of all Isaac Newton’s myriad interests, alchemy appears to have been his passion. His famous works on optics, mechanics and mathematics were mere side-thoughts in comparison to the thirty years he spent on alchemy. He read hundreds of alchemical texts and wrote more than one million words in his notebooks. These notebooks include experimental notes, which appear to only hint at the many hours spent in his laboratory. His thoughts on alchemy developed throughout his life but he seems to have never let go from the belief in a ‘subtle, vegetative agent’ that produces all of nature’s marvellous forms. He kept his studies secret because ‘vulgar eyes’ were not yet worthy to view the noble truths he was attempting to uncover. Both ancient and contemporary sources influenced his ideas: the Stoic philosophy of Greece and Eiremaeus Philalethes among these. Theology had perhaps the greatest influence on his thought. After all, to know the nature of God was the end of all his studies. With this common link, his work on alchemy was directly related to his work in other sciences. Finally, Newton’s reputation today is as a ‘man of reason’; his studies in alchemy do not contradict this. Newton was devoted to God and alchemy was simply a means to the end of unveiling the divine workings of nature.
It can be said, without too much doubt, that today we have entirely different notions of what alchemy and chemistry involve than those which Newton believed in the 17th Century. The modern conceptions we have of terms used in the past are necessarily irrelevant when we are studying Isaac Newton’s work, because they postdate the work itself. This being said, there was a distinction made between chemistry and alchemy in Newton’s time. Newton considered ‘vulgar chymistry’ as merely the imitation of mechanical changes in nature, whereas the art of inducing vegetation (alchemy) was a much nobler and more divine pursuit. Alchemists sought spiritual perfection or the knowledge of perfection, not a study of nature for its own sake. However, there was some overlap between the fields of alchemy and chemistry. Both shared a similar interest in the manipulation and transformation of the different forms of matter by chemical techniques.
Even sceptics of Newton’s work as a pure ‘alchemist’, such as Marie Boas Hall, believe the work was deep and prolonged. Newton’s goal was to penetrate the symbolic vocabulary of alchemy; this required intensive reading of alchemical texts. It also required extensive reading (in order to collate accounts from many different texts to find the truth within). As Jan Golinski points out, ‘Newton was probably better acquainted with the whole body of alchemical writing than anyone before him, certainly more than anyone since…’ Newton acquired manuscripts and books from alchemical sources going back to Hermes Trismegistus. For Newton, encountering many different systems of thought tended to be complementary rather than competitive because each different author could possess a single aspect of the fundamental Truth. The assumption is that each author could specialise in their greatest interest.
In addition to his heavy regimen of reading, Newton was a keen experimenter; there is a very lengthy series of alchemical experiments recorded in his notebook. He thought that an irrefutable scientific demonstration of alchemical occurrences would provide evidence for the existence and activity of the Christian God. He continued to hold this belief throughout his life. The goal of his experiments was to produce ‘philosophic mercury’ as the first step in the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone (the elixir of life, and universal solvent). He sought first to extract the ‘mercury of the metals’ by adding lead filings to a solution of mercury, believing the sulphur of lead would precipitate the mercury of lead. He eventually became dissatisfied with this process, instead turning to the higher aim of discovering the ‘Star Regulus of Antimony’- the crystallizing star formation that appears when antimony is prepared from antimony ore. This, he believed, was able to purify gold of any contaminating metals. There was supposedly a correspondence between the antimony regulus and the celestial star, because the lion of the alchemists symbolised antimony ore. Newton claimed to have found in his experiments many examples of the generation of metals by ‘male’ and ‘female’ counterparts (for example, Mars was iron, Venus was copper) and evidence of active principles at work. He also noticed that one substance did not join with all others, only those with which it was related to; the doctrine of ‘like joins with like’ was common in alchemical literature.
Newton began to compose alchemical writings of his own by 1680. One major undertaking was the Index Chemicus. It was initially designed to be a vast alchemical lexicon but grew to include small essays. Its purpose, throughout its three editions, was to expound the ‘one alchemical work’ behind the myriad of symbols. Also, alchemical theories seeped into his better known works; the Principia and the Opticks. In the Opticks he related light to the alchemical ‘agent’: ‘May not bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?’ In his notes, collected in the Keynes Manuscripts, he writes a number of original chapters, including some on the alchemical agent itself. The vital agent is seen to: ‘accommodate itself to every nature. From metallic semen it generates gold, from human semen, men, etc. And it puts on various forms according to the nature of the subject. In metals it is not distinguished from the metallic substance, in men, not from the human substance, etc.’
Early in Newton’s career (while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge) he began to believe in the ‘aether’, a substance that was thought to be the cause of changes to all forms. It accounted for surface tension (the fly walking on water without touching it), the cohesion of solids, animal motion, static electricity, magnetism and the gravitating principle. This vital agent is diffused throughout all things – it assumed the particular form of the subject so as to be indistinguishable from the subject. Newton called this agent many different things over the course of his alchemical career: the ‘mercurial spirit’, ‘fermental virtue’, ‘vegetable spirit’ and finally the ‘force of fermentation’. It was the natural agent God used to put his will into effect in the natural world. Some time after the publication of the Principia, Newton has a problem with the material nature of the aether; – he could not reconcile this with his theological beliefs – so he dismisses the theory and instead develops the general concept of attractive and repulsive forces. These are influenced by the alchemical principle, with one important difference: the forces were not separate from the matter they inhabited, unlike the ‘seeds’ to be added to the ‘dough’ of matter. They were simply facts of nature; all effected by God in the creation.
Throughout his study, Newton was at pains to keep his endeavours secret. ‘…The Mercurial principle… has been thought fit to be concealed by others that have known it, and therefore may possibly be an inlet to something more noble that is not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there be any verity in [the warning of the] Hermetic writers. There are other things besides the transmutation of metals which none of them understand.’ Newton only communicated his alchemical ideas to a few fellow devotees. He believed he was penetrating a secret tradition of knowledge, which had been (and needed to be) protected from the scrutiny and naïveté of the vulgar by its symbolic language. Precisely because the tradition was secret, it was sacred, noble and powerful. As Dobbs points out, in Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy: the reason Newton never produced a work on alchemy probably means he had enough success to think that he might be on the track of something of fundamental importance and so had a good reason for keeping his ‘high silence’.
Newton scoured many ancient alchemical authorities in his search for the ‘Truth’ of nature. His early concept of the aether was similar to the Stoic philosopher’s pneuma. Both were material in nature, and both inspire the forms of bodies and give to bodies the continuity and coherence of form that is associated with life. They believed – like Newton – that the cosmos is living, ordered and rational and under the benevolent, providential and constant care of the Deity. Spiritualised forms of the pneuma entered early Christian theology in discussions of the immanence and transcendence of God and the Holy Spirit. The Stoic argument for the existence of God from design also entered Christianity. Newton had clearly read some of the Stoic’s texts – or at least texts influenced by Stoic philosophy. The universal spirit and its fermental nature were all originally Stoic ideas, passed down through Neo-Platonism.
Contemporary (or near cotemporary) authorities such as: Johannes Grasshoff, Michael Maier and Eiremaeus Philalethes were all cited frequently in Newton’s work. Newton’s theory of light was especially influenced by Philalethes. Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, influenced Newton’s scientific methodology. It was a self-correcting approach; because every science was subject to error, a more certain approach was to be obtained by utilizing each separate approach to correct the other. This explains why Newton never neglected any area of his interest: no endeavour was better than any other. They could all provide aspects of the whole Truth.
Cartesianism and corpuscularianism posed significant problems for Newton. The atoms in their theories were not guided by God. Newton could not accept this; he believed it would only lead to the belief in a much weaker deity and eventually materialism and atheism. The Cartesians tried to solve the problem by advocating Deism. Later, they instated a Christian providence among the atoms. Only providence could account for the obviously designed forms of plants and animals. The difficulty for them was the question of how providence could operate in a law-bound universe. Newton responded by saying that the mechanical action of matter was not enough, it could account for some but not all processes of life, and certainly not the most important processes. ‘Blind metaphysical necessity’, as he called mechanical action, could not produce variety, because it is always and everywhere the same. Variety required a divine spirit. This spirit is what he provided in his alchemical and theological studies alike.
Newton’s search for the Philosopher’s Stone was closely related to his belief in the Arian Christ. Both were God’s agents in the creation and governance of the world and they were both agents of perfection and redemption. Newton believed that if he could demonstrate laws of divine activity in nature, he could then demonstrate the existence and, most importantly, the providential care of God. Because Newton’s God was so transcendent, it required an ‘active principle’ to connect and interact with the natural world. This was Newton’s ‘vegetative spirit’ that would shape the passive matter of the universe.
Newton also believed that creation had been an alchemical process: ‘that the spirit of God moved upon the waters which was an undigested chaos, or was created before by God’. By doing alchemy he was mimicking God’s providential work. Light was a major factor in Genesis. By illuminating the world God was using his power to activate and reactivate lifeless matter. Newton’s belief in the special nature of light was clearly influenced by this, along with all light’s associations with inspiration divinity prophesy and beauty.
Alchemy held Newton’s interest for over 30 years, much longer than his optical, mathematical and mechanical work. More than one tenth of his collection of books and manuscripts were alchemical. His work on alchemy cannot be reduced to youthful folly; more than half of his alchemical papers were produced after the Principia. In Newton’s mind his scientific work on forces such as gravity and inertia were not separate from alchemical forces. In Opticks he proposed that microscopic analogues of the force of gravity, acting between tiny particles of matter, could explain a variety of chemical phenomena: precipitation, deliquescence and displacement. He insisted that microscopic forces were observable, only the causes of which were hypothetical. Newton was quite explicit that alchemy was the most important science: gravity and vulgar chemistry were purely mechanical. The transformability of matter and the notion of the unity of all matter are two principles that form a bond between Newton’s alchemy and mechanical philosophies. His aether is material, so when set to work to explain natural phenomena its role was virtually indistinguishable from ‘material media’ in mechanics. This can partly explain why his system was co-opted by others (mechanists, materialists, deists and atheists alike) whose beliefs would really be antithetical to Newton’s. These people have helped shaped the view we have of Newton in contemporary society.
Newton’s reputation today as the brilliant and reasonable father of modern science blurs our perception of his involvement in alchemy. Marie Boas Hall defends Newton by saying that lesser men also tried to do what he was doing. He was simply a ‘man of his times’. He was performing ‘chemistry’ not ‘alchemy’. And his habit of looking back to antiquity to find the Truth was seen to be a ‘touching tribute’ to his predecessors rather than naïveté; believing the Truth was available further back in history. However, it cannot be denied that Newton was an alchemist. By Newton’s day alchemy had been pursued consistently for 2000 years in a series of widely divergent cultures. He very much wanted to be a part of this tradition. His goal was to translate the alchemists’ expressions into a simpler, more reasonable philosophy of nature. He believed his endeavours to be both noble and sacred. Additionally, he rejects occult qualities that some in the Hermetic tradition have espoused: ‘These [alchemical] principles I consider, not as occult qualities supposed to result from the specific forms of things, but as general laws of nature, by which the things themselves are formed, their truth appearing to us by phenomena, though their causes be not yet discovered… To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects is to tell us nothing.’ However, Leibniz charge that Newton’s theory contained ‘occult qualities’ caused Newton’s credibility as a public figure to diminish, and thus it was impossible for Newton to reveal his indebtedness to ancient alchemical traditions – he had to emphasise the observable status of force – which further explains the backseat status of his alchemy today. Nowadays, the interest in divinity has diminished and the interest in the science of nature for its own sake has heightened. This has led some scholars to read Newton narrowly; selecting only mathematics, experiments, observation and reason as the essential components of his scientific method.
To do this would be a mistake; not only in omitting what seems to be the main focus of his life’s work, but also to dismiss the most thorough analysis of alchemy ever seen. Newton cannot be seen as any less scientific or reasonable simply because he is a product of the time in which he lived. Newton’s alchemical work is an important document in the history of science and also of history in general, for it encompasses theology, science and philosophy.
Bibliography
Barnes, Barry, ‘Traditions of Research’, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science, New York, 1973.
Dobbs, B. J. T., Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, online, nd, available at: alchemylab.com/isaac_newton.htm
Dobbs, B. J. T., ‘Newton as Final Cause and First Mover’, Isis, December 1994, in a History 240 class handout, 2005, pp. 642-643.
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Newton’s Early Alchemy’ and ‘Newton’s Discovery of Stoic Philosophy’ in Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1995.
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, ‘Isaac Newton, philosopher by fire’ and ‘Vegetability and providence’, in The Janus Faces of Genius, Cambridge, 1991.
Casini, Paolo, ‘Newton, a Sceptical Alchemist?’, in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, eds, Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, London, 1975.
Golinski, Jan, ‘The Secret Life of an Alchemist’, in John Fauvel, et al., eds, Let Newton Be!, New York, 1998.
Hall, Marie Boas, ‘Newton’s Voyage in the Strange Seas of Alchemy’, in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, eds, Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, London, 1975.
Linden, Stanton J., ‘Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)’, in The Alchemy Reader, Cambridge, 2003.
Newton, Isaac, ‘Queries 1-7 and 31’ Opticks, 1704, in a History 240 class handout, 2005, pp. 51-53.
Newton, Isaac, ‘Remarks on an Alchemical Treatise, “Manna”’, 1675, in Malcolm Oster, ed., Science in Europe 1500-1800, New York, 2002.
Olby, R. C., G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, ‘Turning Points – Newton and Natural Philosophy’, in Companion to the History of Modern Science, London, 1990.
Westfall, Richard S., ‘ The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Career’, in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, eds, Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, London, 1975.
I am an anarcho-communist from Auckland, New Zealand. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics and philosophy from the University of Auckland.
Please go to my blog on anarchist theory at anarchism.tk/blog anarchism.tk/blog
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