Newton

No one would ever know what to make of him. One of history's strangest figures, Newton was "the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper that I ever knew," in the judgment of one contemporary. He would spend his life in secrecy and solitude and die, at eighty four, a virgin. High-stung to the point of paranoia, he teetered always on the brink of madness. At least once he would fall over the brink.

. . . .. Newton and many of peers, on the other hand believed fervently that Pythagoras, Moses, Solomon, and other ancient sages had anticipated modern theories in every scientific and mathematical detail ....

This picture of history was completely false, but Newton and many others had boundless faith in what they called "the wisdom of the ancients." Newton went so far as to insist that ancient thinkers knew all about gravity, too, including the specifics of the law of universal gravitation, the very law that all the world considered Newton's greatest discovery.

God has revealed those truths long ago, but they had been lost. The ancient Egyptians and Hebrews had rediscovered them. So had the Greeks, and now, so had Newton. The great thinkers of past ages had expressed their discoveries in cryptic language to hide them from the unworthy, but Newton had cracked the code.

So Newton believed. The notion is both surprising and poignant. Isaac Newton was not only a supreme genius of modern times but also a man so jealous and bad-tampered that he exploded in fury at anyone who dared question him. He refused to speak to his rivals; he deleted all references to them for his published works; he hurled abuse at them even after their deaths.

But here was Newton arguing vehemently that his boldest insights had all been known thousands of years before his birth. Page 36

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus, independently, Newton on his mother's farm and Leibniz in the glittering Paris of Louis XIV. Neither man ever suspected for a moment that anyone else was on the same trail. Each knew he had made a stupendous find. Neither could bear to share the glory. ~ Page 44

Newton did live, and lived to see honors heaped upon him. The fatherless boy, who was born on Christmas Day, believed throughout his life that he had been singled out by God. His story is so implausible that it almost seems that he might have been right. When Newton finally died, in 1727, at age eighty four, a stunned Voltaire watched dukes and earls carry his casket. "I have seen a professor of mathematics, simply became he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had been good to his subject." ~ Page 45

He (Newton) took the Latin from his name, Isaacus Nevtonus, and found in it an anagram, "Ieova sanctus unus, or the one holy Jehovah." He drew attention to the passage in Isaiah where God promises the righteous that "I will give three the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches in secret places."

By the end of the miracle years, Newton found himself awash in hidden riches. He knew mor mathematics than anyone else in the world (and therefore more than anyone who had ever lived). No one ever suspected. "The fact that he was unknown does not alter the other fact that the young man not yet twenty-four, without benefit of formal instruction, had become the leading mathematician of Europe," wrote Richard Westfall, Newton's preeminent biographer." "And the only one who really mattered, Newton himself, understood his position clearly enough. He had studied the acknowledged master. He knew the limits they could not surpass. He had outstripped them all, and by far.

Newton had always felt himself isolated from others. Now at twenty-three, wrote Westfall, he finally had objective proof that he was not like other men. "In 1665, as he realized the full extent of his achievement in mathematics, Newton must have felt the burden of genius settle upon him, the terrible burden which he would have to carry in the isolation it imposed for more than sixty years." ~ Page 232

Thus the first stage of the alchemical process was colored black, for the descent into darkness and primordial chaos of the underworld. The second stage produced its opposite, the color white, symbolizing purity, the quality metal attains at white-hot temperatures. The third stage was golden, an enrichment and ascent of the sun. The final stage was the bloodred vitality after rebirth here on earth. In this way the alchemist was taken into the cosmos. This is Hermes Trismegistus's "fourfold way," best articulated in the 'Emerald Tablet,' an obscure text first recorded around 800, which claimed to reveal the secrets of primordial substance and its transmutations. From this first version the short work appears to have been added to the twelfth-century 'Secret of Secrets' by John of Seville, eventually finding its way into Renaissance texts and hence to Isaac Newton's laboratory, where he penned his own translation. In this he summed up the value of the occult way as he saw it: "By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. (Hermes Trismegistus, 'Emerald Tablet, trans: Isaac Newton).

This was the promise that so attracted Isaac Newton. He knew perfectly well that all the talk of transforming metals was just a facade, even a cover, for a far more profound spiritual awakening: "For alchemy does not trade with metals as ignorant vulgars think, which error has made them distress that noble science, but she has also material veins of whose nature God created handmaidens to conceive and bring forth its creatures" (Isaac Newton, 'Alchemistic Notes," in KCL Keynes MS 33, fol. 5v). a more perfectly Alenandrian set of percepts is hard to imagine. ~ Page 237

Excerpt: Chapter Into the Soft Machine, Title" Alexandria" Authors: Justin Pollard & Howard Reid

Newton was born into lower English gentry and attended Cambridge University. A great genius who spectacularly united the experimental and the theoretical-mathematical sides of modern science. Newton was also fascinated by alchemy. He sought the elixir of life and a way to change base metals into gold and silver. Not without reason did the twentieth economist John Maynard Keynes call Newton the “last of the magicians.” Newton was intensely religious. He had a highly suspicious nature, lacked all interest in women and sex, and in 1693 suffered a nervous breakdown from which he later recovered. He was far from being the perfect rationalist so endlessly eulogized by writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Excerpt: “A History of Western Society” ~ Authors -- John P. McKay / Bennett D. Hill / John Buckler

At the other end of intellectual spectrum, Isaac Newton devoted a large number of essays to the interpretation of apocalyptic scripture (posthumously collected into a single volume, ‘Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/Observations_Upon_the_Prophecies_of_Daniel.pdf) though he wisely refrained from predicting the Second Coming’s date. ` Page 66 Excerpt: "The Delusions of the Crowds"

. . . Even by the nineteenth century, this was old news: A century before, Isaac Newton showed how even extraordinary knowledge and intelligence failed to protect the investor from the bubble siren song. Newton was no financial novice; by the time of the South Sea Bubble, he had been Master of the Mind for nearly a quarter century. He had earned a generous return in South Sea shares that he had brought in 1712, which he sold at a significant profit in early 1720, but later that year lost his head and bought them back at much higher prices. This lost him around Pounds 2,000 and caused him to supposedly remark that he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. ~ Page 121
~ William Bernstein (Author)