Isaac in Isolation

In 1665 the plague descended upon London, forcing all the residents to go into isolation. The COVID-19 of its day, in an age before plumbing or electricity, before iPhones and apps, the isolation was complete to a degree that we can barely fathom today. 

A 22-year old named Isaac used his solitude well, conceiving the laws of infinitesimal calculus. Leibniz is credited with developing Calculus but young Isaac was 8 years ahead of him. Einstein has hailed the insights as “perhaps the greatest advance in thought.”  

At the age of 44 Isaac walked in the gardens of Cambridge University and observed an apple falling straight down to the earth. So he surmised and proceeded to publish, in 1687, Principia which established the foundation for classical mechanics.  A manuscript from the Royal Society retells this conversation of 15 April 1726, when Isaac told a colleague how the idea came to him:

“we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. “why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,” thought he to him self: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: “why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.”

By the age of 55 Isaac had been named, by the British Crown, the Warden of the Mint, and then served as the Master of the Mint for 30-years.  In contemporary terms, the Master was essentially the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, responsible to ensure the value and to assay the gold content of the King’s coins. 

At the age of 62 the King bestowed upon him Knighthood, which is why we universally refer to him as Sir Isaac Newton, one of the towering figures in history, a paragon of rational thought.  

What is less well known of Sir Isaac is that he was a leading alchemist of his day.  The irony is almost mind-boggling: when alchemy was a crime punishable by death by public hanging the Master of the Mint was busy trying to turn base metals into gold.  It is said of more than 10 million words of notes taken by Newton, 1 million at least pertained to alchemy. His interest was more than just a passing curiosity.  By any conventional thought, that is an idea laughably hard to grasp.  

What if alchemy is not about base metals turned into gold, but rather a symbolic language for the pursuit of higher consciousness?  In the three-dimensional realm of conventional thought, where the laws of physics and Darwinian materialism reign supreme, what better symbolism could there be than “base metals” and “gold” referring to the path to wisdom of a greater whole.  

Carl Jung in his Alchemy and Psychology and Fabricius in Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art suggest that this is, in fact, the more accurate understanding.  In The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, B.J.T. Dobbs argues that “Newton’s primary goal was not the study of nature for its own sake but rather an attempt to establish a unified system that would have included both natural and divine principles.”  Newton was a critical link between the Renaissance Hermeticism and the rational chemistry and mechanics of the scientific revolution; in moving the scientific world forward, he looked back upon Neoplatonism, which in turn drew upon the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the towering Hellenistic sage.  

History teaches that higher consciousness threatens conventional thought. In 33 AD the self-righteous Pharisees had the radical street preacher put to death by public hanging. Martin Luther King had an FBI file and was assassinated for arguing that “all people are created equal.” In the year 2025, the pious among us ban books from libraries that challenge their narrow minded sense of self. The orthodox, it seems, are not expansive but restrictive and limiting.

Newton was wise never to publish his alchemical writings. In fact, many of them were burned by a fire; the story told that a dog knocked over a candle in his study, but one wonders what was the risk to his reputation for that intellectual pursuit.  He remained, in a sense, in isolation throughout his life for his pursuit of alchemy. 

The record shows that when Newton stepped down from the 2nd Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics – considered the single most prestigious professorship in the world – his replacement, William Whiston excoriated Newton publicly for his highly unorthodox views.  No doubt Professor Whiston was smug in his self righteous words and considered the case closed. But in fact, it may be that he had simply locked himself, and his peers, inside the box of self limiting, rational thought.

The world is more vast than we tend to conceive.  It would seem the challenge of our times now is to expand our collective higher consciousness, to awaken and more fully hear and embrace those “mystic chords…of our better angels.”

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