NEWTON, ISAAC (b. Woolsthorpe, England, 25 December 1642; d. London, England, 20 March 1727), mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics, astronomy, optics, natural philosophy.

    preach metaphysics to the unlearned common people, and to their wives and children?” Other queries in this set are also historical; in the seventh Newton marshaled his historico-philological acumen in the matter of the Latin rendering unius substantiae, which he considered to have been imposed on the Western churches instead of consubstantialis by “Hosius (or whoever translated that [Nicene] Creed into Latin).” Another manuscript entitled “Paradoxical Questions” turns out to be less a theological inquiry than a carefully reasoned proof of what Lord Keynes called “the dishonesty and falsification of records for which St Athanasius [and his followers] were responsible.” In it Newton cited, as an example, the spreading of the story that Arius died in a house of prostitution.

In a Keynes manuscript (in King's College, Cambridge), “The First Book Concerning the Language of the Prophets,” Newton explained his method:

He that would understand a book written in a strange language must first learn the language. . . . Such a language was that wherein the Prophets wrote, and the want of sufficient skill in that language is the reason why they are so little understood. John . . ., Daniel . . ., Isaiah . . . all write in one and the same mystical language . . . [which] so far as I can find, was as certain and definite in its signification as is the vulgar language of any nation. . . .

Having established this basic premise, Newton went on: “It is only through want of skill therein that Interpreters so frequently turn the Prophetic types and phrases to signify whatever their fancies and hypotheses lead them to.” Then, in a manner reminiscent of the rules at the beginning of book III of the Principia, he added:

The rule I have followed has been to compare the several mystical places of scripture where the same prophetic phrase or type is used, and to fix such a signification to that phrase as agrees best with all the places: . . . and when I had found the necessary significations, to reject all others as the offspring of luxuriant fancy, for no more significations are to be admitted for true ones than can be proved.

Newton's alchemical manuscripts show that he sometimes used a similar method, drawing up comparative tables of symbols and of symbolic names used by alchemists, no doubt in the conviction that a key to their common language might be found thereby. His careful discrimination among the alchemical writers may be seen in two manuscripts in the Keynes Collection, one a three-page classified list of alchemical writers and the other a two-page selection of “authores optimi,” by whom Newton perhaps meant authorities who described processes that might be repeated and verified. The Babson Collection of Newtoniana contains a two-page autograph manuscript listing 113 writers on alchemy arranged by nationalities and another seven-page manuscript of “chemical authors and their writings” in which Newton commented on the more important ones. At least two other such bibliographical works by Newton are known. An “Index Chemicus,” an elaborate subject index to the literature of alchemy with page references to a number of different works (described as containing more than 20,000 words on 113 pages), is one of at least five such indexes, all in autograph manuscripts.179

It must be emphasized that Newton's study of alchemy was not a wholly rational pursuit, guided by a strict code of linguistic and historical investigative procedures. To so consider it would be to put it on the same plane as his chronological inquiries.180 The chronological studies are, to a considerable degree, the result of the application of sound principles of astronomical dating to poor historical evidence—for which his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended was quite properly criticized by the French antiquarians of his day—while his alchemical works show that he drew upon esoterical and even mystical authors, far beyond the confines of an ordinary rational science.

It is difficult to determine whether to consider Newton's alchemy as an irrational vagary of an otherwise rational mind, or whether to give his hermeticism a significant role as a developmental force in his rational science. It is tempting, furthermore, to link his concern for alchemy with his belief in a secret tradition of ancient learning. He believed that he had traced this prisca sapientia to the ancient Greeks hat in the 1690's, when Newton was preparing a revise or magicians; he concluded that these ancients had known even the inverse-square law of gravitation. Cohen, McGuire, and Rattansi have shown that in the 1690's, when Newton was preparing a revised edition of the Principia, he thought of including references to such an ancient tradition in a series of new scholia for the propositions at the beginning of book III of the Principia, along with a considerable selection of verses from Lucretius' De natura rerum. All of this was to be an addendum to an already created Principia, which Newton was revising for a new edition.

There is not a shred of real evidence, however, that Newton ever had such concerns primarily in mind in those earlier years when he was writing the Principia or initially developing the principles of dynamics and of mathematics on which the Principia was ultimately to be based. In Newton's record of alchemical