Part III

Passions

7. "All Species of Metals ... from This Single Root"

THE HONORABLE ROBERT BOYLE, seventh son and fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, had been ill throughout 1691. In July the situation became grave enough to jolt him into writing a will. By Christmastime it was clear that the great chemist (and notable experimental physicist) was dying.

Boyle's intellectual output had been prodigious. Just as important for the future of British science, he had the gift of recognizing and supporting brilliance when he saw it. Boyle had been Robert Hooke's first patron, John Locke's mentor, the young Newton's occasional correspondent. For three decades and more, he had been the living center of London's learned life. But his decline was no great surprise to those who knew him well. He had been sickly as a child and frail ever after. He had dodged the worst afflictions of the great plague epidemic of the mid-1660s and the more routine ebb and flow of the other infectious diseases that carried off so many contemporaries. But he had endured almost everything else: fevers in and out of season, excruciating recurrent kidney stones, a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed, although he had continued to dictate experimental procedures to assistants as he recovered.

He was a man of deep and committed Christian faith. He believed in the resurrection and the glory of God and the joys of the world to come. But if death should have held no terrors for him, Boyle was human enough to admit to fear of the pain of dying. He was fortunate in this, as in so much else. Late in the day on December 31, his life ended calmly, with no evident distress, in his bed at the grand house on Pall Mall.

Isaac Newton set out for London the day after Boyle's death, and almost certainly went to Boyle's funeral at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on January 7. Two days later, he dined with fellow mourners, including Samuel Pepys and his fellow diarist John Evelyn—another of the founders of the Royal Society—and their conversation turned to "thinking of a man in England fitt to bee set up after [Boyle]" as the leader of the nation's intellectual life.

The obvious candidate, of course, was sitting at that dinner table. But the right position in London still eluded Newton. Also, unknown to Pepys and Evelyn, the immediate consequence of Boyle's death was to force Newton to confront anew work both he and Boyle had attempted—and kept almost entirely hidden—for two decades.

Death bursts secrets, and this one began to crack just weeks after Boyle's funeral. In February 1692, Newton wrote to John Locke, mostly to announce that he would abandon hopes for a patronage job for a while. But in the last line of what reads like a hurried postscript, he notes that Locke—one of Boyle's oldest friends—had taken possession of something he cryptically called "Mr. Boyles red earth."

Locke's reply has been lost, but apparently he picked up on the hint and sent Newton a sample. Then a ripped and partial letter from Newton in July seems to warn Locke off sensitive ground. He writes that he had received too much of the earth, "For I desired only a specimen, having no inclination to prosecute ye process." But, he added, if Locke wanted to attempt the experiment, then he would try to help, "having a liberty of communication allowed me by Mr. B[oyle], in one case wch reaches you." Newton said that he stood obliged to Boyle to preserve this secret—and presumed that Locke, equally Boyle's confidant, accepted the same obligation. The implication is obvious: the process employing the red earth was incredibly sensitive and could not be discussed unless Locke committed to a vow of silence.

Locke replied swiftly. He assured his friend that he had been initiated into the mystery: Boyle had "left to ... me the inspection of his papers"—including the ones never intended to reach the public. To reassure Newton, he enclosed copies of "two of them that came to my hand, because I know you desired it." One document survives. It describes in fairly clear language the series of steps through which one might purify the element mercury: wash it repeatedly with a particular soap that would, Boyle wrote, force it to "throw out any feculency that may lie concealed in  [mercury]."

Simple as it sounded, Boyle's experiment clearly fascinated Locke, and Newton felt compelled to give his friend one last warning. To his certain knowledge, Boyle had first examined this process as much as twenty years earlier, "and yet in all this time I cannot find that he has either tried it himself or got it tried with success by anybody els." Newton, for his part, wanted nothing to do with it. He was glad Locke had received instruction from Boyle's papers, for "I do not desire to know what he has communicated but rather that you would keep ye particulars from me ... because I have no mind to be concerted with this R any further than just to know ye entrance." Locke could go ahead if he wished, regardless of Newton's efforts to "perhaps save your time and expense." Yet for all his studied lack of interest, Newton allowed he had a project of his own: "I intend ... to try whether I know enough to make a  [mercury] wch will grow hot with  [gold]."

To find a substance, some "mercury," that will interact with gold? Now Newton was getting to the nub of the matter. Boyle's reluctance to part with all he knew, even to Newton; Newton's initial circumspection with Locke; Locke's own withholding of the larger and more provocative part of the process—all these derived from the fact that the three men were talking—or rather, trying not to talk about—one of the deepest mysteries of the natural world. William Chaloner was not the only man in England searching for a way to create wealth without limit. The esoteric recipe hidden in Boyle's papers—or so Newton and Locke hoped, or wondered, or doubted—contained a method by which someone adept in the manipulation of matter and heat could transform base metal into pure, lustrous, immortal gold. In other words: alchemy.

From this distance, after almost three hundred years of systematic chemistry, alchemists seem little better than con men, or at best self-deceivers. To modern eyes, alchemy is groundless superstition, the same sort of unreason that led some of Newton's contemporaries to fear the occult powers of witches.

In fact, alchemists had a bad reputation by Newton's day too. Ben Jonson parodied them as greedy charlatans in The Alchemist, first performed in 1610. His hero, Subtle, wields a half-mastered patter of alchemical jargon in order to gull the gullible and win the affections of a comely nineteen-year-old widow. He openly counterfeits: to persuade one reluctant client to hand over the last of his money while he waits the two weeks or so for the alchemical process to produce cartloads of gold, he offers "a trick / to melt the pewter, [that] you shall buy now, instantly / and with a tincture make you as good Dutch dollars as any are in Holland."

And yet, Robert Boyle, who was neither a criminal nor much given to folly, pursued alchemy with passion. So did Isaac Newton for more than twenty years, with all the concentration and effort that he devoted to mathematics or physics, producing more than a million words of notes: queries, copies of older texts, and page after page of laboratory results. He and Boyle and Locke—and dozens of others throughout Europe—still felt the urgent need to mix and shake and heat and cool compound after compound, in pursuit of something more valuable to them than mere gold. Why?

Because, at least for Newton, alchemy offered two prizes of infinite worth. The first was the usual aim of Newton's investigations: knowledge of the created world. Alchemy, as he and Boyle approached it, was an empirical, experimental science. Its theory was occult—literally, hidden—but its practice was hard, hot, and practical, the manipulation of matter with heat, solvents, weights and measures. Each alchemical experiment told Newton some fact about the behavior of the physical world.

That was an end worth seeking on its own terms, but it was the second aim of the work that drove Newton's periodic near-obsessive concentration on alchemy. Newton understood the implications of the expanding reach of natural philosophy, of course—none better. When he first encountered the mechanical worldview, he had concluded that it made no sense to declare that "y^e first matter" derived from any prior source, "except God." He crossed out those last two words, it's true—but he had written them down first.

And in them, Newton recognized the essential fact that remains at the core of modern science with its material explanations for physical events. In a world composed entirely of matter in motion, the traditional role of God had to shrink. The author of a mechanical universe could put events in train, but after that primary impulse, the cosmos could then wend its way forward through time on its own.

It was not just Newton who felt the chill of an increasingly Godless nature. Every careful observer understood the implications of the new approach. The year after Newton was born, one of its central proponents, René Descartes, had to defend himself against charges of atheism. In 1643, Martin Schoock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, bitterly condemned Descartes as the "prince of Cretans" (from the old gibe about the man from Crete who assures his hearers that he speaks the truth when he says that all Cretans are liars); for being a "lying biped"; and, worst of all, because "he injects the venom of atheism delicately and secretely into those who, because of their feeble minds, never notice the serpent that hides in the grass."

To Schoock, the sin lay less with Descartes' physics and more with his reverence for the power of human reason. He was particularly suspicious of what he saw as the Frenchman's strangely weak affirmation of the existence of God. (Descartes complained of the unanswerable nature of the charge to the French ambassador to The Hague, writing that "simply because I demonstrated the existence of God, [Schoock] tried to convince people I secretly teach atheism.") Descartes himself escaped serious consequences. But the stench of atheism stuck to the new science—and by the time Newton first came into contact with Descartes' work, the implications of a physics that virtually eliminated the need for God to act in history were obvious even to a youth just starting to read the basic texts on the fringes of the educated world.

Newton ultimately demolished Descartes' physics, and long before that he had found a way, satisfying at least himself, to restore God to the center of the action in space and time—most dramatically, perhaps, in his arguments for why the sun and the planets should experience their mutual gravitational attraction.

His early writings about how divine action shaped the solar system were still a bit vague, as in the letter he wrote in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in which he suggested "so perhaps may the Sun imbibe this Spirit copiously to conserve his Shining, & keep the Planets from recedeing further from him." But Newton had sharpened his view by the time he came to the Principia. Gravity, he argued, derived from divine action. There, he invoked the presence of God directly, declaring that when the tails of comets brushed past the earth, they deposited that spirit "which is the smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of our air, and which is required for the life of all things."

As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and, above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the Principia as testimony to the existence and glory of all-creating divinity: "When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work w^th considering men fore the beleife of a Deity," he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. "Nothing can rejoice me more," Newton added, than that his work would prove "useful for that purpose."

Finally, in 1713, Newton expressed his mature conception of divine action in a short essay added to Book Three of the second edition of the Principia. Called the "General Scholium," it contains a passionate account of God triumphant in nature. He wrote, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." How smart? How powerful? "This Being governs all things"—and Newton meant governs—"not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all." What are his attributes? "The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being ... He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient." Where does this God reside? "He endures forever and is everywhere present ... He is omnipresent not virtually but also substantially."

This was a God to animate the dry bones of mathematical philosophy. Existing everywhere, for all time, he is "all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act." All this within a cosmos that Newton elsewhere called his "boundless, uniform Sensorium," within which God could "form and reform the Parts of the Universe."

That is: Newton's God existed everywhere, "substantially"—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton's demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton's natural philosophy was thus, as he had told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.

Newton was convinced. Nonetheless, some uncharitable louts remained unpersuaded, disdainful. Leibniz, for one, ridiculed the notion of a divine sensorium and what he saw as Newton's flight to an occult explanation for gravity. What was wanted, what Newton sought, was an eyewitness demonstration of divine action in nature.

Hence, alchemy. Alchemy seemed to offer a way for him to rescue his God from the threat of irrelevance—salvation through the ancient alchemical idea of a vital agent or spirit. This vital spirit, Newton wrote, had all the attributes of God. It was omnipresent—"diffused through everything in the earth." It was enormously powerful, destroying and creating throughout nature: "when it is introduced into a mass of substances its first action is to putrefy and confound into chaos; then it proceeds to generation." In the conventional language of alchemy, this cycle of decay and growth was called vegetation. "Nature's actions," Newton wrote, "are either vegetable ... or purely mechanicall." In contrast to mere mechanics, vegetation animated matter, as the vital spirit served as "her fire, her soule, her life."

Pared down to its essence, Newton's quarter of a century of alchemical experimentation formed his attempt to capture the active, vegetative spirit through which God translates divine intention into the shapes and changes of the living world. He annotated his hermetic texts, interpolating thoughts about the process of vegetation, of the vital, living spirits that propelled its changes, and, above all, of God as the first author of living transformation. Then, from his writing desk upstairs in his rooms at Trinity, he would take those secret thoughts to the shed next to the chapel, there to seek tangible proof of that divine, ubiquitous, active presence.

He had kept at it all those years—parts of four decades—because here, he believed, he could actually demonstrate how God continued to work in the world. He said so explicitly in a note from the 1680s: "Just as the world was created from dark Chaos through the bringing forth of the light and through the separation of the aery firmament and of the waters from the earth," Newton wrote, checking off the boxes of the first chapter of Genesis one by one. "So our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos and its first matter through the separation of the elements and the illumination of matter."

His work? Human hands, his own hands and eyes and brain, to bring beginnings out of impenetrable chaos? No one should ever say that Isaac Newton was passionless: this is the cry of an ecstatic, as extravagant in his dreams of communion as any desert-maddened hermit. But strip away what borders on hubris, too close an imitation of God, and what remains is Newton's essential ambition: to replicate divine action closely enough to provide incontrovertible, material proof of the fact of God's work in Creation and ever after.

He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know—and not just believe—that the King of Kings would indeed reign triumphant, forever and ever.