Isaac Newton’s Blended Scientific and Occult World Views

Here’s Sir Isaac Newton, sporting what looks like some pretty fantastic quarantine hair in his 46th year. Solitary, misanthropic, and quirky (he once experimented on optics by putting a needle deep into his eyesocket to see how his vision would change), Newton’s work on classical mechanics revolutionized how people understood the cosmos. We all can likely chant out the remainder of his first law of motion: “objects in motion ___ in motion. Objects at rest . . . ” well, you know the rest. It is how most of us still think about gravity.

But Newton’s works were not unilaterally progressive. He invented calculus, worked on optics, and made careful statements when it came to thinking about the forces of gravity (“I frame no hypothesis,” he wrote, regarding why objects move). Yet he was deeply invested in the occult, writing so many papers on alchemy and Biblical prophecy that the economist John Keynes famously quipped that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason . . . . [But] he was the last of the magicians”. It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around a world view that saw no radical gap between knowledge sought through the scientific method, and knowledge obtained by a desire to find patterns using confirmation bias. But here we are. The second image shows Newton’s illustration of the Temple of Solomon, which he imagined used sacred geometry. He also thought that the various shapes of the structure were reflective of Deep Hidden Profound Truths of Divine Knowledge.

Newton’s scientific and occult world views blend in two ways. First, Newton and his peers correctly argued that the objects in outer space obey the same laws of physics as objects we interact with on earth. As above, so below. And alchemists had also long believed in a connection between the heavens above and the earth below in their views of astrology. Second, Newton’s world was highly mechanistic — it ran according to prescribed rules, like a machine. These rules had to be figured out, and were not obvious to most people. These statements held true of both the laws of motion and the process of understanding hidden properties of metals.