Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033)

by Glassie, John

  The title itself, translated as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, seems intended to signal the end of the confusion that existed throughout Kircher’s lifetime between what it meant to demonstrate something (or prove something wrong) and what it meant merely to speculate. “I hope to show—as it were, by my example—how valuable mathematics is in natural philosophy,” Newton later stated. “Instead of the conjectures and probabilities that are being blazoned about everywhere, we shall finally achieve a natural science supported by the greatest evidence.” Privately Newton was tired of the notion that mathematicians “who find out, settle & do all the business must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators & drudges,” while others do “nothing but pretend and grasp at things.” Rather than providing superficial quantities and measures that shed no light on the deeper truth and essence of nature, mathematics in Newton’s hands seemed to get right at its essence, leading to the popular Enlightenment notion that God himself was a sort of mathematician who put an elaborate clockwork universe into place.

  The Principia was printed with the permission of the Royal Society but paid for out of the pocket of Edmund Halley, later of comet fame, because the society’s only other publishing venture, the lavish History of Fishes, had been a flop. Some time naturally had to pass before the arguments of the Principia were widely accepted. Very few people could even understand them. This was despite the fact that Newton had tried to make them as accessible and palatable as he could. He had originally reached his conclusions by means of his own “infinitesimal calculus,” but for publication he’d gone back and made his arguments work within the more widely understood laws and language of geometry.

  Newton’s subsequent reputation was such that a hundred fifty years later—in the midst of the industrial age, which owed its existence to Newtonian mechanics—an introduction to a new edition of the Principia could state that it “is celebrated, not only in the history of one career and one mind, but in the history of all achievement and human reason itself.” The very character of its author was “held up as the noblest illustration of what Man may be, and may do, in the possession and manifestation of pre-eminent intellectual and moral worth.”

  In day-to-day life this “noblest illustration of what Man may be” was variously awkward, ambitious, obsessive, easily offended, vindictive, petty, and mean. A troubled celibate who was at least said to have laughed only once or twice, Newton used his wealth later in life to upholster in crimson much of what he owned. He was born the year Galileo died, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, about a year before Kircher turned sixty. Quickly dismissing the Aristotelian doctrine still being taught, he read ancient and modern mathematics based on his own curiosity, and was hugely influenced by the new method and physical philosophy of Descartes as well as Gassendi. In 1665, when the plague came through England, Cambridge was closed down, and he stayed at his family home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, with nothing but time on his hands.

  During a two-year period of manic productivity, Newton (literally) figured out what today is called the generalized binomial theorem and developed his basic method of fluxions and fluents, his terms for differential and integral calculus. (As he described it, this was the method by which, “given the length of the space continuously” at every instant, he could “find the speed of motion at any time proposed,” and, inversely, how, “given the speed of motion continuously,” he could “find the length of the space described at any time proposed.”) His optical investigations included sticking a bodkin or blunt needle underneath his eyeball to see how changing its curvature would affect what he saw. Through dozens of experiments with prisms of his own manufacture, he determined that colors weren’t produced by alterations to light, as everyone assumed, but that white light was made of colors. And whether or not a falling apple in the Woolsthorpe orchard was as crucial to Newton’s thinking as the famous story suggests, he “began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon,” as he later claimed, and calculated (from Kepler’s laws on planetary motion) that the forces required to keep the moon and the planets in their orbits would operate in “pretty nearly” the same way as the force that pulls an apple to the surface of the earth. That is, according to the inverse of the squares of their distances from the larger bodies.

  It’s possible to argue that Newton got more right between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-five than Kircher got right in a lifetime. But their interests, outlooks, and erudition, as well as many of their ideas, if not their methodologies or their mathematical abilities, were strikingly similar. Early in his college career, Newton made sundials and clocks, experimented with magnets, tried his hand at creating a universal language, and “ground and polished glasses . . . for all kinds of optical purposes.” When he studied color, his reading of ancient harmonics (the “harmony and discord of sounds”) led him to look for a correspondence between the colors of the spectrum and the seven notes of the diatonic musical scale. (More accurately, he looked for a correspondence between the ratios between the notes and the ratios between the colors.) Cheating a little with his math to find one, Newton added a seventh color to the rainbow that doesn’t really belong: indigo, between blue and purple.

  Years later, Voltaire heard that Newton had gotten his ideas about the correspondence between color and sound from The Great Art of Light and Shadow. But after he cracked open the book to a section where Kircher matched types of human voices to colors, and to animal natures, and to personality traits, he dismissed the idea as laughable. It’s true that Kircher’s name is absent from Newton’s long, handwritten lists of authors and authorities, and from the catalogs of books in his library. Given the fact that Kircher was read by virtually every other intellectual in England at the time, however, and that Newton’s library contained della Porta’s Natural Magic, Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, the body of the works said to be written by Hermes Trismegistus, and more than a hundred fifty other books that might be described as magical or alchemical, its absence is conspicuous. There is no way to know if Newton read Kircher, but it’s very likely that he did.

  Once Newton returned to Cambridge, he built the first reflecting telescope, more powerful despite its tabletop size than the 150-foot refracting telescope of the Polish brewing heir Johannes Hevelius. Since it operated by virtue of mirrors, it might have been called, as Kircher might have called it, the first catoptric telescope. Around the same time, he also set up a laboratory in a shed adjacent to his room, with glassware and furnaces for chemical and alchemical experiments. He subsequently pursued alchemy with incredible, meticulous intensity for more than thirty years, not quite to the exclusion of everything else, secretly becoming, in a modern biographer’s words, “the peerless alchemist of Europe.” Newton’s assistant recalled: “The Fire scarcely going out either Night or Day, he siting up one Night, as I did another, till he had finished his Chymical experiments. . . . What his Aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his Pains . . . made me think at something beyond the Reach of humane Art and Industry.”

  Newton steeped himself in the notion of a pristine original faith. In pursuit of sacred knowledge, he read a vast range of texts by ancient and esoteric authors, and spent decades trying to piece together a precise chronology of humankind and its theologies. (More than half of Newton’s written output is on theology and religion, and he wrote or copied down more than a million words on alchemy.) Newton studied the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus with increasing attentiveness and respect over his lifetime, regarding the alchemical tracts attributed to him as older and closer than any others to original wisdom. And he struggled to reconcile the new math-based mechanical philosophy with Hermetic descriptions of a primordial power that, as worded in his own translations, “penetrates every solid thing.”

  Something appeared to be at work in many natural processes—an “active principle,” a force—that could not easily be explained by the movement of perfectly dead p
articles of physical matter. Newton’s alchemical experiments, his tests on air and electricity, and a great deal of his thinking, were aimed at getting to the bottom of it. Many chemical processes could be explained by what he called “vulgar” or “brute” physical interaction, the “gross mechanical transposition of parts.” But how to explain, for example, the spontaneous generation of living vermin from rotting matter without some animate presence, living agent, or spirit? (Newton never doubted that living vermin were engendered this way. Francesco Redi wrote Experiments on the Generation of Insects in Italian, not Latin, and besides, the book didn’t settle the debate.) It was increasingly unsatisfactory to say, as the Aristotelians did, that it was the nature or final cause of an acorn to become an oak tree. But then what did cause the acorn to become an oak? If Newton’s preliminary calculations about the orbit of the moon were correct, how was it that the Earth could pull at the moon from such a distance with no physical contact whatsoever?

  In an early alchemical paper, Newton described the process of generation and putrefaction by which he believed metals, and other living things, vegetated: it was the “sole effect of a latent spirit” that had penetrated or become intimately embedded within “rude matter” in various states of “maturity.” This “vegetable spirit,” which he also referred to as “Nature’s universal agent, her secret fire” and “the material soule of all matter,” was unimaginably subtle, traveling around in vapors and fumes through such processes as fermentation, putrefaction, and evaporation, and participating in various material forms: “When two vegetable spirits are mixed of unequall maturity,” Newton wrote, “they fall to work, putrefy, mix radically & so proceed in perpetuall working till they arrive at the state of the less digested.” In his alchemical shed, Newton was keen to record instances of attraction and repulsion at the smallest observable level. About certain chemical compounds he noted a “propensity to associate with one another,” about others “a secret principle of unsociableness.”

  About two years after Kircher published The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature—in which he emphatically reiterated his notion that “the world was bound with secret knots,” and insisted that the “hidden form operating in all things” should be called “magnetism”—Newton began referring to the active force as “magnesia.” “This & only this,” Newton wrote, “is the vital agent diffused through all the things that exist in the world.”

  —

  MEANWHILE, AMONG MEMBERS of the Royal Society such as Christopher Wren, John Wallis, John Wilkins, and Robert Hooke, consensus was increasing around the idea first proposed by William Gilbert in De Magnete: that a magnetic or similar kind of connection was responsible for keeping the moon and the planets in motion, and from flying out into oblivion. “Whether by any Magnetick or whatother Tye,” Wallis stated, that connection was “past doubt.” Hooke wrote a paper as early as 1666 “concerning the inflection of a direct motion into a curve by a supervening attractive principle,” and later engaged Newton in a series of exchanges on the idea. He shared his own theory—that a drawing power of this sort would be inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two given bodies. But it was only Newton who could do the math, demonstrating, for example, that such an attraction would produce Kepler’s elliptical orbits.

  Newton didn’t have much trouble determining that this universal force wasn’t actually magnetic, since “some bodies are attracted more by the magnet; others less; most bodies not at all,” and since the sun “is a vehemently hot body & magnetick bodies when made red hot lose their virtue.” But the gravitational force described in the Principia and associated with Newton’s greatest scientific contribution was nevertheless an invisible attractive power—the kind of unseen and, as far as Newton could determine, immaterial force that Kircher would have said he’d already described, long before.

  Gravity was “occult,” at least in the sense of the word’s earliest meaning. But it was also, as Newton put it, “manifest.” In the end, he could quantify and measure it by its effects, but he could not say exactly how or why it worked. “I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I feign no hypotheses: for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy,” Newton tried to explain in the second edition of the Principia. “It is enough that gravity really does exist and acts according to the laws that we have set forth, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies and of our sea.”

  But in many respects, it wasn’t enough, least of all for Newton, who almost made himself crazy wrestling with questions about the cause of gravity. (In truth, his apparent breakdown in 1693 was more likely the effect of exposure to so much mercury in his alchemical shed.) He obsessed over the possibility that a very subtle material or semi-material explanation might be found after all, and over his inability to take his discoveries further. “For many things lead me to suspect,” he’d written, “that all phenomena may depend on certain forces by which particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, either are impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled from one another and recede.” At least Newton was content in his belief that the ancients had understood everything he’d found out, and much more besides. He believed he’d been able to restore some part of the old knowledge that had been lost along the way.

  Newton’s statement wasn’t remotely enough for a number of the most fiercely intelligent intellectuals of the time. For people like Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz, gravity had less to do with new mathematics than with, for example, the old salve that could heal the injured when applied to the weapon that had wounded them. Leibniz and Newton were still in the midst of their ugly dispute over who had been the first to develop calculus; they went at it for many years, publishing vicious attacks on each other under false names. Though an advocate of unity and accord in almost every political, philosophical, and religious circumstance, Leibniz felt intense enmity for Newton. To him, Newton’s gravity was an “occult quality” in the modern sense: it was magic. It was, he said, “a supernatural thing, that Bodies should attract one another at a distance, without any intermediate means.”

  Leibniz was not actually against the idea of immateriality. He later came to understand the world as utterly immaterial, mere perception, a phenomenon composed of aggregations of pure soul-like substances. Borrowing from the Pythagoreans, he called them monads. These were “the real atoms of nature,” he said, which formed divine, sophisticated, lifelike agreements with one another through “pre-established harmony.” In Leibniz’s conception, there was no need to distinguish between body and soul because even though the “material” world was real enough to experience with the senses and to be “explained mathematically and mechanically,” there was no actual body.

  Nevertheless, Leibniz’s argument against Newton’s conception of gravity was that it was an “immaterial and inexplicable virtue.” Not only was it “invisible, intangible,” and “not Mechanical,” it was “unintelligible, precarious, groundless, and unexampled.” From Leibniz’s point of view, it “must be a perpetual Miracle: And if it is not miraculous, it is false.”

  Whatever gravity actually is—Einstein said it was not really a force, but a warp in the dimension of space-time; in the twenty-first century, scientists are somewhat hard-pressed to say—it came to be recognized as fact. And, of course, Kircher came to be associated with the fictions of the pre-scientific past. “Surely it is no coincidence,” a modern historian says, “that the crystallization of Kircher’s reputation as the most ridiculous of the late Renaissance encyclopedists and the emergence of Newton as the first man of science both occurred in the same period.” Pretty soon their fates were sealed.

  But even a century after Kircher’s death, there were still a few people for whom the distin
ction wasn’t so clear-cut. “In my opinion the Egyptian system of the world, which was based on the laws of attraction and repulsion, seems to be the closest of all to the truth,” wrote a Slovak intellectual named Adám Ferencz Kollár in 1790. “This opinion of mine now has the consent of all Europe, which approved it not so long ago, but attributed it to Newton, in his calculus. But Kircher came before Newton; and lest someone thinks that I am daydreaming, I would have him read carefully and with an unprejudiced mind those things that Kircher wrote.”

  23

  The Strangest Development

  Although Leibniz, for his part, had Kircher to thank for much of his early thinking and inspiration, over time he changed his opinion of Kircher’s abilities, and in the end took apparent pleasure in scoffing at him. He’d sent Kircher oily praise in 1670 for The Great Art of Knowing, but by 1716 he’d decided that Kircher “had not even dreamed of the true analysis of human thoughts.” The same year, about Kircher’s interpretations of the hieroglyphs, Leibniz offered a final, offhanded conclusion: “He understands nothing.”

  But it was largely because of Kircher that Leibniz became interested in Chinese culture, philosophy, religion, and language. (Kircher’s China Illustrated was published the year Leibniz turned twenty-one.) And if it hadn’t been for Leibniz’s interest in China, and his own subsequent correspondence with a number of Jesuit missionaries, he never would have found what he believed to be the ancient precedent for his system of binary arithmetic. In 1701 a priest in Peking sent Leibniz a treatise on the I Ching, the text now popularly used for divination and the interpretation of events. It was composed of sixty-four hexagrams and said to be authored by an ancient Chinese philosopher-king. When Leibniz examined the sequence of hexagrams, he decided almost immediately that it was a rendering of binary numerical progression. (It wasn’t.) In his view the I Ching was perhaps the very first mathematical-metaphysical text. And because he’d been persuaded by Kircher’s arguments that Chinese culture had descended directly from that of the ancient Egyptians, he believed he knew the true identity of the king who had written it down: Hermes Trismegistus. With this assurance that he’d restored some part of the original wisdom, Leibniz published his description of the binary scheme in 1703, and made it so that, at least according to his conception of it, every bit (short for “binary digit”) of information in every modern digital device contains some combination of God (1) and nothingness (0).