Isaac Newton (14 page)

Oldenburg—no friend to Hooke
¹⁵
—chose to surprise him with a public reading of Newton’s rejoinder at the next Royal Society meeting. Finally, after years of jousting by proxy, Hooke decided to take pen in hand and address his adversary personally.
¹⁶
He adopted a meek and philosophical tone. He said he suspected Newton was being misinformed; he had experience with such “sinister practices.” He did not wish to contend or feud or be “drawn to such kind of warr.” We are “two hard-to-yield contenders,” he proclaimed. “Your Designes and myne I suppose aim both at the same thing which is the Discovery of truth and I suppose we can both endure to hear objections.”

Newton’s famous reply came a fortnight later.
¹⁷
If the
weapons of this duel were to be insincere politesse and exaggerated deference, he could wield them as well. He called Hooke a “true Philosophical spirit.” He gladly embraced the proposal of a private correspondence. “What’s done before many witnesses is seldome without some further concern than that for truth: but what passes between friends in private usually deserves the name of consultation rather than contest, & so I hope it will prove between you & me.” And then, for the matter of their dispute, he put on record a finely calibrated piece of faint praise and lofty sentiment:

What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.
¹⁸

The private philosophical dialogue between Newton and Hooke never took place. Almost two years passed before they communicated again at all. By then Oldenburg had died, Hooke had succeeded him as Secretary of the Royal Society, and Newton had withdrawn ever more deeply into the seclusion of his Trinity chambers.

9
 
All Things Are Corruptible

H
IS DEVOTION
to philosophical matters grew nonetheless. He built a special chimney to carry away the smoke and fumes.
¹

By Newton’s thirties his hair was already gray, falling to his shoulders and usually uncombed. He was thin and equine, with a strong nose and gibbous eyes. He stayed in his chamber for days at a time, careless of meals, working by candlelight. He was scarcely less isolated when he dined in the hall. The fellows of Trinity College learned to leave him undisturbed at table and to step around diagrams he scratched with his stick in the gravel of the walkways.
²
They saw him silent and alienated, with shoes down at heel and stockings untied. He feared disease—plague and pox—and treated himself preemptively by drinking a self-made elixir of turpentine, rosewater, olive oil, beeswax, and sack. In fact he was poisoning himself, slowly, by handling mercury.
³

No one could understand till centuries later—after his papers, long hidden and scattered, began finally to be reassembled—that he had been not only a secret alchemist but, in the breadth of his knowledge and his experimentation, the peerless alchemist of Europe. Much later, when
the age of reason grew mature, a fork was seen to have divided the road to the knowledge of substances. On one path, chemistry: a science that analyzed the elements of matter with logic and rigor. Left behind, alchemy: a science and an art, embracing the relation of the human to the cosmos; invoking transmutation and fermentation and procreation. Alchemists lived in a realm of exuberant, animated forces. In the Newtonian world of formal, institutionalized science, it became disreputable.

But Newton belonged to the pre-Newtonian world. Alchemy was in its heyday. A squalid flavor did attach to such researches; alchemists were suspected as charlatans pretending to know how to make gold. Yet the modern distinction between chemistry and alchemy had not emerged. When the vicar John Gaule, an expert on witchcraft, assailed “a kinde of præstigious, covetous, cheating magick,” he called this malodorous practice by its name:
chymistry
.
⁴
If alchemists were known to treasure secrecy and obscure their writings with ciphers and anagrams, these habits were no bar for Newton, burrowing further inward. If they revered arcane authorities and certain sacred texts, if they adopted Latinate pseudonyms and circulated secret manuscripts, so for that matter did Christian theologians. Newton was a mechanist and a mathematician to his core, but he could not believe in a nature without spirit. A purely mechanical theory for the world’s profusion of elements and textures—and for their transformations, from one substance to another—lay too far beyond reach.

He met with mysterious men and copied their papers—a W.S., a Mr. F.
⁵
He devised a pseudonym,
Jeova sanctus unus
, an anagram of Isaacus Neuutonus. In the garden outside
his room he built a laboratory, a shed abutting the wall of the chapel. His fire burned night and day.
⁶
To alchemists nature was alive with process. Matter was active, not passive; vital, not inert. Many processes began in the fire: melting, distilling, subliming, and calcining. Newton studied them and practiced them, in his furnaces of tin and bricks and firestones. In sublimation vapors rose from the ashes of burned earths and condensed again upon cooling. In calcination fire converted solids to dust; “be you not weary of calcination,” the alchemical fathers had advised; “calcination is the treasure of a thing.”
⁷
When a crimson-tinged earth, cinnabar, passed through the fire, a coveted substance emerged: “silvery water” or “chaotic water”—quicksilver.
⁸
It was a liquid and a metal at once, lustrous white, eager to form globules. Some thought a wheel rimmed with quicksilver could turn unaided—perpetual motion.
⁹
Alchemists knew quicksilver as Mercury (as iron was Mars, copper Venus, and gold the sun); in their clandestine writings they employed the planet’s ancient symbol,
. Or they alluded to quicksilver as “the serpents.”
¹⁰

“The two serpents ferment well …” Newton wrote at one session. “When the fermentation was over I added
16
^gr
& the matter swelled much with a vehement fermentation.…”
¹¹
Like other alchemists, he conceived of mercury not just as an element but as a state or principle inherent in every metal. He spoke of the “mercury” of gold. He particularly coveted a special, noble, “philosophical” mercury: “this
 … drawn out of bodies hath as many cold superfluities as common
hath, & also a special form & qualities of the metals from which it was extracted.
¹²
Part of mercury’s esoteric appeal was its tendency to react with
other metals. Applied to copper, lead, silver, and even gold, it formed soft amalgams. A skillful practitioner could use mercury to purify metals. Over time, mercury builds up in the body, causing neurological damage: tremors, sleeplessness, and sometimes paranoid delusions.

Robert Boyle, too, was experimenting with mercury. In the spring of 1676, Newton read in the
Philosophical Transactions
an account “Of the Incalescence of Quicksilver with Gold, generously imparted by B.R.”
¹³
He recognized the inverted initials, and he suspected that the research drew near the alchemists’ dream of multiplying gold. “I believe the fingers of many will itch to be at the knowledge of the preparation of such a
,” he wrote privately. A dangerous sort of knowledge might lie nearby—“an inlet to something more noble, not to be communicated without immense damage to the world.”
¹⁴
Newton believed—and knew Boyle did, too—that the basic substance of matter was everywhere the same; that countless shapes and forms flowed from the varied operations of nature on this universal stuff. Why should the transmutation of metals be impossible then? The history of change was all around.