The Papers Nobody Wanted

When Isaac Newton died in 1727 he left an enormous body of unpublished manuscript. His heirs had it examined. The verdict recorded on much of it was that it was not fit to be printed, and the papers went into a trunk, where a large part of them remained essentially unexamined for the next two hundred years.

In July 1936 the collection was sold at Sotheby's. It went cheaply, in lots, to private buyers. The economist John Maynard Keynes acquired a substantial portion of the alchemical material, largely because almost nobody else wanted it.

What Keynes found was not a footnote. By the estimates that have followed the modern cataloguing effort, Newton wrote something on the order of a million words on alchemy: laboratory notebooks, transcriptions of alchemical texts, indexes of alchemical terminology cross-referenced across dozens of sources, and his own experimental records. That is more than he wrote on the mathematics and physics for which he is known.

Keynes described what this did to his picture of the man in a lecture written for the Newton tercentenary and delivered posthumously in 1946. Newton, he said, was not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians, the last mind to look at the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.

The reflex response is that the alchemy was a private eccentricity, walled off from the real work. That reading is difficult to sustain once the material is read, and specialists who have worked through it, notably Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, have argued the opposite at length. Newton's alchemy was pursued with the same experimental discipline as his optics: repeated procedures, careful notation, quantities recorded.

There is also a suggestive continuity of concept that is worth stating carefully because it is easy to overclaim. Newton proposed that bodies act on one another at a distance, through no intervening medium, by an attractive force. Contemporaries including Leibniz regarded this as a reintroduction of occult qualities into natural philosophy, and by the standards of the mechanical philosophy of the day the objection was reasonable. Action at a distance was exactly the sort of sympathetic influence that the new science had defined itself against.

The claim is not that alchemy produced gravitation. It is that the man who was willing to entertain unmediated action between separated bodies had spent decades in a tradition where such action was ordinary, and that his contemporaries noticed the resemblance and objected to it on those grounds.

The suppression here was not institutional in the way an Index is. Nobody banned the papers. They were withheld by heirs, ignored by editors, and finally sold off because they were an embarrassment to a story about the origins of modern science that the papers complicated.

That is worth naming as a distinct mechanism, because it may be the most common one. Material is not forbidden. It is simply inconsistent with the account a discipline tells about its own founding, and so it is not catalogued, not taught, and not read, and after enough time the omission is indistinguishable from an absence.

The Newton Project has now transcribed and published the alchemical corpus. It has been freely available for years. It is still not what anyone is taught about Newton.