Newton died on 20th March, 1727 leaving hundreds of unpublished manuscripts; some of which date back to his arrival at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. His heirs invited Thomas Pellett to examine the manuscripts and report on their suitability for publication. After just three days of examining these hundreds of manuscripts, Pellett, a qualified physician and member of the Royal Society, dismissed the majority of the manuscripts as being “not fit to be printed”, “of no scientific value” and “loose and foul papers”.
Pellett only found two sets of manuscripts suitable for publication. The first was a set of manuscripts on chronology and the second were two manuscripts on prophecies. Although Pellet claimed that the text on prophecy was imperfect, they were nevertheless worthy of publication. The other manuscripts, which included drafts of the Principia, mathematical and scientific papers, his correspondence and works on prophecy, chronology, alchemy and theology were passed on to his niece Catherine Conduitt. With the marriage of Catherine’s daughter into the Portsmouth family, the manuscripts become part of the Portsmouth Collection.
In 1872, the papers were offered to the University of Cambridge, which only accepted the scientific papers, refusing the other papers on topics that Newton was not famous for. The remaining non-scientific manuscripts were offered to the British Library, which also refused them on similar grounds. These manuscripts remained in the Portsmouth Collection until 1936, when they were auctioned and dispersed into collections all around the world.
The auction was held in July in 1936 at Sotheby’s. The manuscripts were divided up into three-hundred and thirty lots and sold to thirty-three buyers. Thus Newton’s manuscripts were scattered all over the world. It is surprising that these manuscripts were allowed to leave England. Josè Faur considered that the reason for this was because of the contents of the manuscripts. Manuscripts on prophecy, alchemy and Newton’s unorthodox theology did shock some scholars. It was “to protect Newton’s ‘good name,’ [that] the importance of the manuscripts were denied”.
One of the buyers was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought a significant number of manuscripts which he bequeathed to King’s College, Cambridge. He made a study of these manuscripts and found
that Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more extraordinary than the nineteenth century cared to make him out. Geniuses are very peculiar.
The nineteenth century, in their adulation of Newton, had rendered him quite bland. After poring over the contents of the box of manuscripts he had purchased, Keynes claimed:
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 begin to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
This very famous quote was written by Keynes in 1942. The paper “Newton the Man” was written for the tercentenary celebration of Newton’s birth, but the Second World War intervened and the paper was not presented until 17 July 1946, after Keynes’ death in April of that year. These tercentenary celebrations were conducted on an international scale and ran for five days culminating in a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Keynes’ paper was read to the Royal Society by his brother, Geoffrey. It had not been revised by the author, who had written it some years back. Keynes was the first to publicly consider Newton as more than the orthodox image of the romantic dreamer scientist. He considered Newton’s faults and also what appeared from an early twentieth century perspective to be unorthodox practices such as alchemy, his style of theology, his interest in chronology and church history and his argumentative nature, in conjunction with his great scientific achievements. These were aspects of Newton’s character that had been ignored or glossed over by previous commentaries and biographies.
These discoveries in Newton the Man by Keynes did not lessen his admiration for Newton. He considered that the box of papers that he was studying showed Newton to be a man with great power of mind, who attempted to understand all aspects of God and nature. Newton’s experiments were not undertaken for mere discovery, but to verify what he already knew, and to confirm his strong belief in God. Keynes wrote:
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty – just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibnitz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.
As more and more of Newton’s papers became available to scholars, Keynes’ words seem increasingly insightful and revealing. Keynes considered that there were two sides to Newton’s character they were “Copernicus and Faustus in one”. Scientist and magician were the same man working to one purpose and whose achievements were seemingly beyond his era but at the same time founded in the knowledge of the ancients.
Later biographies have assumed that the works on theology, chronology and prophecy were the works of an ageing Newton. That there were two Newtons; the great scientist of his youth and the ageing Newton who had lost his taste and ability for science and turned to the study of chronology, prophecy and religion as a result of the nervous breakdown he suffered in 1693. However, these two separate and diverse personas are not supported or divided by any such date and Newton did continue to research and add to the science of his day. Furthermore, his papers and interest in chronology and prophecy date back to his earliest days in Cambridge in the 1660s.
Newton’s deeply held religious convictions led him to search for the mystic clues which he believed that God had laid about the world. This search had resulted in his scientific research in the form of the Principia and Opticks; both are landmarks in science. Alchemy, chronology, theology and prophecy as well as natural philosophy were all parts of these clues which Newton attempted to unravel or decrypt. It is unclear whether there was a dividing line in the mind of Newton between these topics; however, all of these topics confirmed his belief in the supreme design of the universe.
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