Introduction

When Isaac Newton left Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1696 to go to London to become Warden of the Mint, his life changed from that of an introspective private scholar to that of a famous public figure. Before he left, he packed a box with unpublished writings that detailed the investigations he had been pursuing for some years. The vast majority of these remained concealed for more than two hundred years while Newton developed a brilliant reputation as a symbol of rationality and science. John Maynard Keynes shattered the popular interpretation of Newton by publicizing the contents of the box. They showed that, contrary to the standard account, Newton accepted ideas that since the Enlightenment have been disparaged as unscientific, including such things as alchemy and the philosopher’s stone. As Keynes wrote, “Tradition treats Newton as a pure eighteenth century figure of almost Voltairean rationalism. In fact, the whole of his thought and background were rooted in what preceded him” (cited in Skidelsky 2000: 165). Keynes’s revelation did not affect the validity of Newton’s important conclusions, but it did cast them in a different light. It is remarkable that a thinker who made such important contributions to science also believed things that seem so obviously untrue today. While Newton seems close to us because of his role in creating modern physics, he had a vastly different understanding of the world and especially of the relationship between religion and science. Newton arrived at his scientific conclusions in the course of what was, for him, a religious inquiry. Keynes concluded,

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.