In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians […]
The quotation above is from a lecture Keynes had prepared to delivery to the Royal Society as part of the celebration of the tercentenary of Newton’s birth.* The box packed up by Newton contained a collection of personal notes which only came to public attention when they were auctioned off in 1936. Keynes was one of the first people to go through these notes, and he reported that:
A large section, judging by the handwriting amongst the earliest, relates to alchemy—transmutation, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life. The scope and character of these papers have been hushed up, or at least minimized, by nearly all those who have inspected them.
Hence, Keynes’s oft-quoted characterization of Newton, “the last of the magicians”. But, with that characterization, Keynes seems to have fallen into the error of presentism—he judged Newton’s seventeenth-century preoccupations from the vantage point of twentieth-century science.
I’ve written admiringly about the polymathic Ball before, in the early days of this blog: see my post “Three Books About Colour” for more about him. And Yale University Press has produced a beautifully illustrated tome to support his text—the reproduction of relevant manuscripts, paintings and sketches is both copious and excellent.
The book’s compact chapters are interspersed with biographies of some of the major alchemical players, from the borderline-mythical Jabir ibn Hayyan to Isaac Newton himself. Further interleaved are short sequences of full-page illustrations, supplementing the smaller images that appear on nearly every page.
Alchemy, Ball tells us, had its origin in the simple, practical chemistry of Ancient Egypt and the Baghdad Caliphate—the production of metals, pigments and glass. Separate traditions arose in China and India, and may have fed into Western practice.
So it was demonstrable and obvious to everyone, for centuries, that stuff could be turned into other stuff. The Greeks understood this in terms of a small number of elements, which made up all matter, and they hypothesized that materials could be transformed, one into another, by adjusting the relative proportions of these (admittedly elusive) elements. Against that philosophical background, it was not unreasonable to suppose that metals could be (somehow) remixed and transformed into gold, if only the right recipe could be found—particularly given that the Earth seemed to manage to cook up pure gold underground. And it was undoubtedly possible to produce metals that had something of the appearance of gold—so why couldn’t the real stuff be produced, somehow? In Newton’s time, the proto-chemist Robert Boyle was preoccupied with trying to discern how these elements might work, and what transformations might therefore be (or not be) possible. In that context, Newton’s interest in alchemy seems like a routine scientific enquiry, rather than an excursion into magical thinking.
And alchemists, Ball points out, were the people who gave us the idea of repeated experiments, carried out in well-equipped laboratories, and recorded in notebooks. They also gave us the concept of iatrochemistry—the idea that something cooked up in a laboratory could be used to treat disease. So all very sciency, really.
But they also developed a whole system of what would now be called sympathetic magic—complex relationships between metals and the planets, for instance. In a poorly understood universe, this wasn’t an unreasonable hypothesis, but it’s the sort of thing that, with the benefit of hindsight, had Keynes talking about “magicians”. Alchemy’s reputation also suffered from the fact that it was a happy hunting-ground for charlatans and swindlers from its earliest days, and its reputation was not improved by the idea, among its practitioners, that they were party to Secret Knowledge, which had to be guarded and encoded with complex symbolism.
Ball also explores alchemical laboratory processes and vocabulary—alembics and crucibles; elixirs and spirits and essences. My favourite among the etymologies he offers is actually a fake one—the story that the element antimony gets its name from Latin antimonachos “nemesis of monks”, because of an alleged mass poisoning episode perpetrated by the (pseudonymous, if not fictitious) alchemist, Basil Valentine.†
The cast of characters is huge, from royalty to scoundrels, clerics to conjurers, artists to scientists. The design, layout and illustration of the book is gorgeous (though the Arab physician Muḥammad al-Rāzī has been the victim of a typesetting lapse). My only complaint would be that there’s not enough text—I wanted more detail than Ball had space to give.
* The tercentenary celebration, which should have taken place in1942, was delayed because of World War II. Keynes died before the rescheduled event in 1946, so his brother, Geoffrey Keynes, delivered the lecture in his place. † The Latin name of antimony, antimonium, predates the writings attributed to “Basil Valentine” by 400 years. The true etymology is unknown, but the OED posits that it is, “like other terms of alchemy, a corruption of some Arabic word, refashioned so as to wear a Gr. or L. aspect.”
