This focus on Newton’s non-scientific side leads us neatly to the next of the books you’ve selected, Newton and the Origins of Civilization by Buchwald and Feingold. He tries to debunk the 18th-century view of Newton as a supreme rationalist and even possibly a deist. In it, he argues famously that Newton was not the first scientist of the age of reason, but rather the last of the magicians. Most of them he subsequently gave to King’s College Cambridge, where they remain, but he wrote an extraordinary article called “ Newton the Man” which was published posthumously in 1947. There was a famous Sotheby’s auction of Newton manuscripts by his heirs in 1936 and Keynes managed to acquire about half of them.
One thing that’s interesting about Manuel-and for that matter Westfall and almost everybody else who has come later-is that all these folks were influenced to some degree, perhaps without even realizing it, by John Maynard Keynes. He tries to explain Newton’s psychology in terms of his childhood lack of a father. The book attempts to provide a kind of Freudian psychoanalytic study of Newton’s character. I personally think that, of all the books written on Newton, his is stylistically the most engaging. Manuel was a brilliant historian and perhaps an even more brilliant writer. Manuel’s book was published in 1968, so it’s considerably earlier than Westfall’s. What does it add to the story that Westfall doesn’t? It starts with his childhood in Lincolnshire and has chapters on his time at Cambridge and then in public life in London. The next book is A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel, which is also a biography. Instead, Newton’s alchemical research had a serious impact on his optics, as I explain in Newton the Alchemist, and it also contributed to his work on the short-range forces operating in chemical reactions, which the eighteenth century called ‘elective affinity.’ Newton came to be seen as the patron saint of elective affinity, thanks to a section of his famous 1717 Opticks that dealt with the theme of chemical attraction. In reality, however, there is little to no evidence to support the view that alchemy led to Newton’s belief in action at a distance. Contemporary sources ranging from popular outlets such as Wikipedia to serious scholarly monographs echo this theme. Couldn’t this sort of explanation have stimulated Newton to think of gravity in terms of an immaterial attraction? And wasn’t alchemy based on the idea that some materials react with others because of a similar principle of affinity? Thus the idea that Newton’s involvement with alchemy was part of a quest to understand gravitational attraction was born. The reason why a lodestone attracted iron at a distance was because of a hidden sympathy between the two, like the occult sympathies governing magical phenomena. The major scholars of the subject at that time, especially Westfall, argued that the impact of alchemy on Newton’s more mainstream science lay in his emphasis on invisible forces that could act over a considerable space, such as gravitational attraction.
There is currently a widespread ‘master narrative’ of Newton’s alchemy, though one with which I disagree. Can his alchemical work be seen as foundational for modern science or was it a dead end? His work on alchemy is your area of expertise and the subject of your latest book: Newton the Alchemist. You mentioned Newton’s alchemical papers. So there’s a lot of material that Westfall wasn’t able to take account of, yet all the same, his work is a magnificent synthesis. Westfall didn’t have access to all of that in 1980. Part of the reason for that is because we now have digital sites like the Newton Project in the UK, which has been editing Newton’s theological and religious writings-his prophetic writings more generally-and then the Chymistry of Isaac Newton site that I am the general editor of at Indiana University, that’s been editing the alchemical papers, Newton’s work on chemistry. Some of the other books that I recommended represent attempts to come to terms with sections of Newton’s work in a deeper way than Westfall was able to do in 1980. It’s somewhat dated now, because it appeared in 1980 and Newton scholarship has recently experienced a remarkable change. It’s the only treatment of Newton that really tries to give a detailed study of the totality of his science alongside his religion and his work on alchemy, which covered more than 30 years.
The first of the books about Isaac Newton you’ve chosen is a biography, Never at Rest by Richard Westfall. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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