A good source on Newton's alchemical investigations is
the account of his life in Keynes's _Essays in Biography_.
>From the second page of his essay on "Newton, the Man":
"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." Barkley Rosser On Tue, 19 May 1998 23:28:29 +0100 Mark Jones <Jones_M at netcomuk.co.uk> wrote:
> Charles, you know I never joke.
>
> Mark
> PS Actually it isn't the news some people seem to think, that Newton was
> a cabalist, magician, projector and [failed] alchemist. That was what he
> was really interested in and what he considered his life's work. All
> that stuff about gravity, calculus, etc, was just his day-job.
>
> Charles Brown wrote:
> >
> > >>> Mark Jones wrote:
> >
> > Since everybody is now
> > agreed that (a) Newton was actually a loony alchemist and (b) clocks weren't
> > very important to the Ind Revo (c) even if there was a Science Revolution,
> > it made no difference to industrial technology, then it clearly doesn't
> > matter whether or not the Chinese had science, or indeed whether, as
> > Frank argues, Europe was sinified and Indianised in the 18th c.
> >
> >
> >
> > Mark, is this a joke ? or serious ?
> >
> > Charles
>
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu