‘Historians of alchemy', wrote Herbert Butterfield in 1949, ‘seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.' Seventy years on, readers may believe that this gloriously rude assessment needs no updating. But what, then, are we to make of the fact that the greatest scientific hero of them all, that model of geometric rationality, Isaac Newton, devoted a great proportion of his life to the pursuit of transmutation? This was the problem that faced another titan of his discipline, the economist John Maynard Keynes, when in 1936 he acquired at auction a large number of Newton's papers dealing with alchemy. Newton, Keynes was forced to declare, ‘was not the first of the age of reason' but rather ‘the last of the magicians'.
The discovery of Newton's alchemical manuscripts – containing no fewer than a million words, some of the pages mutilated by the acids used during his quest for the philosopher's stone – led to a flurry of scholarly activity. This culminated in the 1980s in the work of Richard Westfall, still Newton's greatest biographer, and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. In a spectacular rejection of Butterfield's dismissiveness, they argued that alchemy underpinned Newton's whole world-view. Newton's belief in transmutation, Dobbs claimed, was akin to a religious quest, with the ‘philosophic mercury', believed to be ableto break down metals into their constituent parts, acting as a spirit mediating between the physical and divine realms. Westfall suggested that it was assumptions born in Newton's alchemical researches about invisible forces acting at a distance that allowed him to develop his greatest theory: that of universal gravitation, which he announced to the world in his Principia of 1687.
In half a century, scholars had gone from treating Newton's alchemy as something to be embarrassed about to suggesting that it be seen as the very foundation of all his endeavours. Such wild oscillations of the interpretative pendulum are rarely healthy. Butterfield, Keynes, Dobbs and Westfall disagreed about how important alchemy was to Newton and to the development of modern science, but they all shared the assumption that it was part of an ‘occult' tradition, to be categorised alongside astrology and magic. In the last twenty years or so, we have learned to think very differently. In what has been perhaps the most spectacular revision of our understanding of the so-called Scientific Revolution, we have come to appreciate that alchemy was not simply a deviant activity conducted by magi driven semi-mad by mercury fumes and the unfortunates whom they managed to dupe. Rather, it was a central part of the early modern study of nature, not to be separated from what later became chemistry.
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