Are Scientists more Religious than Artists?
Was Isaac Newton an occultist? Well, it is documented that he was a type of alchemist.
Alchemy is the precursor to our modern-day chemists, although alchemist’s final goal was to find that ‘philosopher’s stone’. The stone that could turn all base metals into gold; or one that could fend off death. It seems that Newton, like many of his contemporaries, was really interested in how things worked, how metals interacted with each other, how nature arranged things. His alchemy seemed based on curiosity, rather than blasphemy.
As for occultist, Newton had a secret system to try and decode the Bible – but anyone with his curiosity and pattern-finding mind would work on other things besides the material world. He had the propensity to find out how things worked.
And like any human being, he must have at times thought quite a bit of himself. His favorite Latin anagram for his name "Isaacvs Nevtonvs" was "Ieova Sanctvs Vnvs," or "Jehovah's holy one." But everyone indulges in little acts of supremacy at times – to no avail and to no harm.
As for his eccentricities like this one (and others), well there is a saying "Mad dogs and Englishmen"!
Newton’s understanding of the components of light is really related to his alchemical work. He broke down the constituents of light, just like he did his metals, to find the single strands that made up the whole. White light traveling through a prism gives a spectrum of colored lights was one of his major discoveries.
Newton had disagreements with the form of Christianity that was believed in the England of his time. It was his own, perhaps at times misguided, attempt at trying to find the rational in the universe, trying to find God. But, he was a fundamentally religious, and Christian, person. In his quest to understand the nature that God created, he wrote:
"All these things being consider'd, it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation." |
