Newton and the Counterfeiter (11 page)

From this distance, after almost three hundred years of systematic chemistry, alchemists seem little better than con men, or at best self-deceivers. To modern eyes, alchemy is groundless superstition, the same sort of unreason that led some of Newton's contemporaries to fear the occult powers of witches.

In fact, alchemists had a bad reputation by Newton's day too. Ben Jonson parodied them as greedy charlatans in
The Alchemist,
first performed in 1610. His hero, Subtle, wields a half-mastered patter of alchemical jargon in order to gull the gullible and win the affections of a comely nineteen-year-old widow. He openly counterfeits: to persuade one reluctant client to hand over the last of his money while he waits the two weeks or so for the alchemical process to produce cartloads of gold, he offers "a trick / to melt the pewter, [that] you shall buy now, instantly / and with a tincture make you as good Dutch dollars as any are in Holland."

And yet, Robert Boyle, who was neither a criminal nor much given to folly, pursued alchemy with passion. So did Isaac Newton for more than twenty years, with all the concentration and effort that he devoted to mathematics or physics, producing more than a million words of notes: queries, copies of older texts, and page after page of laboratory results. He and Boyle and Locke—and dozens of others throughout Europe—still felt the urgent need to mix and shake and heat and cool compound after compound, in pursuit of something more valuable to them than mere gold. Why?

Because, at least for Newton, alchemy offered two prizes of infinite worth. The first was the usual aim of Newton's investigations: knowledge of the created world. Alchemy, as he and Boyle approached it, was an empirical, experimental science. Its theory was occult—literally, hidden—but its practice was hard, hot, and practical, the manipulation of matter with heat, solvents, weights and measures. Each alchemical experiment told Newton some fact about the behavior of the physical world.

That was an end worth seeking on its own terms, but it was the second aim of the work that drove Newton's periodic near-obsessive concentration on alchemy. Newton understood the implications of the expanding reach of natural philosophy, of course—none better. When he first encountered the mechanical worldview, he had concluded that it made no sense to declare that "y
^e
first matter" derived from any prior source, "except God." He crossed out those last two words, it's true—but he had written them down first.

And in them, Newton recognized the essential fact that remains at the core of modern science with its material explanations for physical events. In a world composed entirely of matter in motion, the traditional role of God had to shrink. The author of a mechanical universe could put events in train, but after that primary impulse, the cosmos could then wend its way forward through time on its own.

It was not just Newton who felt the chill of an increasingly Godless nature. Every careful observer understood the implications of the new approach. The year after Newton was born, one of its central proponents, René Descartes, had to defend himself against charges of atheism. In 1643, Martin Schoock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, bitterly condemned Descartes as the "prince of Cretans" (from the old gibe about the man from Crete who assures his hearers that he speaks the truth when he says that all Cretans are liars); for being a "lying biped"; and, worst of all, because "he injects the venom of atheism delicately and secretely into those who, because of their feeble minds, never notice the serpent that hides in the grass."

To Schoock, the sin lay less with Descartes' physics and more with his reverence for the power of human reason. He was particularly suspicious of what he saw as the Frenchman's strangely weak affirmation of the existence of God. (Descartes complained of the unanswerable nature of the charge to the French ambassador to The Hague, writing that "simply because I demonstrated the existence of God, [Schoock] tried to convince people I secretly teach atheism.") Descartes himself escaped serious consequences. But the stench of atheism stuck to the new science—and by the time Newton first came into contact with Descartes' work, the implications of a physics that virtually eliminated the need for God to act in history were obvious even to a youth just starting to read the basic texts on the fringes of the educated world.

Newton ultimately demolished Descartes' physics, and long before that he had found a way, satisfying at least himself, to restore God to the center of the action in space and time—most dramatically, perhaps, in his arguments for why the sun and the planets should experience their mutual gravitational attraction.

His early writings about how divine action shaped the solar system were still a bit vague, as in the letter he wrote in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in which he suggested "so perhaps may the Sun imbibe this Spirit copiously to conserve his Shining, & keep the Planets from recedeing further from him." But Newton had sharpened his view by the time he came to the
Principia.
Gravity, he argued, derived from divine action. There, he invoked the presence of God directly, declaring that when the tails of comets brushed past the earth, they deposited that spirit "which is the smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of our air, and which is required for the life of all things."

As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and, above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the
Principia
as testimony to the existence and glory of all-creating divinity: "When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work w
^th
considering men fore the beleife of a Deity," he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. "Nothing can rejoice me more," Newton added, than that his work would prove "useful for that purpose."

Finally, in 1713, Newton expressed his mature conception of divine action in a short essay added to Book Three of the second edition of the
Principia.
Called the "General Scholium," it contains a passionate account of God triumphant in nature. He wrote, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." How smart? How powerful? "This Being governs all things"—and Newton meant governs—"not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all." What are his attributes? "The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being ... He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient." Where does this God reside? "He endures forever and is everywhere present ... He is omnipresent not virtually but also substantially."

This was a God to animate the dry bones of mathematical philosophy. Existing everywhere, for all time, he is "all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act." All this within a cosmos that Newton elsewhere called his "boundless, uniform Sensorium," within which God could "form and reform the Parts of the Universe."

That is: Newton's God existed everywhere, "substantially"—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton's demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton's natural philosophy was thus, as he had told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.

Newton was convinced. Nonetheless, some uncharitable louts remained unpersuaded, disdainful. Leibniz, for one, ridiculed the notion of a divine sensorium and what he saw as Newton's flight to an occult explanation for gravity. What was wanted, what Newton sought, was an eyewitness demonstration of divine action in nature.

Hence, alchemy. Alchemy seemed to offer a way for him to rescue his God from the threat of irrelevance—salvation through the ancient alchemical idea of a vital agent or spirit. This vital spirit, Newton wrote, had all the attributes of God. It was omnipresent—"diffused through everything in the earth." It was enormously powerful, destroying and creating throughout nature: "when it is introduced into a mass of substances its first action is to putrefy and confound into chaos; then it proceeds to generation." In the conventional language of alchemy, this cycle of decay and growth was called vegetation. "Nature's actions," Newton wrote, "are either vegetable ... or purely mechanicall." In contrast to mere mechanics, vegetation animated matter, as the vital spirit served as "her fire, her soule, her life."

Pared down to its essence, Newton's quarter of a century of alchemical experimentation formed his attempt to capture the active, vegetative spirit through which God translates divine intention into the shapes and changes of the living world. He annotated his hermetic texts, interpolating thoughts about the process of vegetation, of the vital, living spirits that propelled its changes, and, above all, of God as the first author of living transformation. Then, from his writing desk upstairs in his rooms at Trinity, he would take those secret thoughts to the shed next to the chapel, there to seek tangible proof of that divine, ubiquitous, active presence.

He had kept at it all those years—parts of four decades—because here, he believed, he could actually demonstrate how God continued to work in the world. He said so explicitly in a note from the 1680s: "Just as the world was created from dark Chaos through the bringing forth of the light and through the separation of the aery firmament and of the waters from the earth," Newton wrote, checking off the boxes of the first chapter of Genesis one by one. "So our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos and its first matter through the separation of the elements and the illumination of matter."

His work? Human hands, his own hands and eyes and brain, to bring beginnings out of impenetrable chaos? No one should ever say that Isaac Newton was passionless: this is the cry of an ecstatic, as extravagant in his dreams of communion as any desert-maddened hermit. But strip away what borders on hubris, too close an imitation of God, and what remains is Newton's essential ambition: to replicate divine action closely enough to provide incontrovertible, material proof of the fact of God's work in Creation and ever after.

He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know—and not just believe—that the King of Kings would indeed reign triumphant, forever and ever.

T
HERE IS A FAMOUS
picture of Trinity College made during Newton's tenure there. In the foreground, just before the college gate, two men talk while a couple of dogs wrangle. A few members of the college walk the paths of the Great Court, and near the northwest corner of grounds, someone tends a small bonfire. The architecture looks familiar, much the same as now, but there is one detail that has long since been lost: a crude little structure tucked against the choir end of the college chapel, close beside Newton's rooms. Almost certainly, this cramped, dark shed was where Newton kept his alchemical laboratory.

Newton's first alchemical research began in 1668. He returned to it for extended periods over the next quarter century. He kept the work quiet, fully committed to the alchemical tradition of secrecy. When Robert Boyle announced that he planned to publish some of his results in the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions,
Newton was horrified by the breach of security. There were practical reasons for his caution: as Ben Jonson's gibes demonstrated, alchemy looked an awful lot like counterfeiting to the uninitiated. In fact, such experiments were against the law, England's Act Against Multipliers, a statute whose repeal Boyle himself arranged in 1689. But worse, from Newton's point of view, was the notion of exposing potentially divine (and hence extremely powerful) secrets to the vulgar masses. If the process Boyle described had applications beyond heating gold, its description could cause "immense damage to ye world." Newton added—or rather warned—"I question not but that ye great wisdome of ye noble Author will sway him to high silence."

As measured by the time, effort, and accuracy of his laboratory trials, Newton was by far the most sophisticated and systematic alchemist in history. Most other genteel alchemists, even Boyle, relied on assistants to do the messy side of the work. Newton himself performed the tedious sequences of grinding, mixing, pouring, heating, cooling, fermenting, distilling, and all the other manipulations required. He even designed and built with his own hands the furnaces within which his alchemical reactions took place.

Above all, he demanded a level of empirical precision that no other alchemist had ever attempted, and he pursued that experimental rigor with manic, total devotion. Humphrey Newton described what went on there as a continuous, almost industrial operation: "About 6 weeks at Spring and 6 at ye fall, the fire in the Elaboratory scarcely going out either Night or Day, he siting up one Night, as I did another till he had finished his Chymical Experiments." For every experiment, Newton recorded to the grain the amount of each input, and measured its products to the limit of his instruments to resolve. Newton repeated his experiments as often as necessary, Humphrey Newton reported—never mind the heat, the fumes, the choking smoke that alchemical trials routinely produced. Through it all he never violated the adept's code of secrecy, even to his own servant: "What his Aim might be, I was not able to penetrate."