The Chymistry of Isaac Newton and the Chymical Foundations of Digital Humanities

My paper will examine both a specifi c digital humanities project,
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton <http://www.chymistry.org/>,
and refl ect more broadly on the fi eld of digital humanities, by
suggesting useful parallels between the disciplines of alchemy
and digital humanities. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project is
an effort to digitize and edit the alchemical writings of Newton
and to develop digital scholarly tools (reference, annotation,
and visualization) for interacting with the collection.
Newton’s “chymistry” has recently become a topic of
widespread public interest.[1] It is no longer a secret that the
pre-eminent scientist of the seventeenth century spent some
thirty years working in his alchemical laboratory, or that he
left a manuscript Nachlass of about 1,000,000 words devoted
to alchemy. Newton’s long involvement in chymistry fi gures
prominently in NOVA’s 2005 “Newton’s Dark Secrets,” and
it occupies a major portion of the documentary’s website
at <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/>. Even more
attention was devoted to Newton’s alchemy in the 2003 BBC
production “Newton: The Dark Heretic.” Newton’s chymistry
also is featured in recent popularizing studies such as Gleick’s
2003 Isaac Newton and White’s 1997 Isaac Newton: the Last
Sorcerer. Despite the fascination that Newton’s chymistry holds
for the public, the subject has not received a corresponding
degree of scrutiny from historians since the untimely passing
of B.J.T. Dobbs in 1994 and Richard Westfall in 1996. Dobbs
had made the issue of Newton’s alchemy a cause célèbre in her
infl uential historical monograph, The Foundations of Newton’s
Alchemy of 1975, and Westfall built upon her work in his own
magisterial biography of Newton, Never at Rest , of 1980.
The relative lack of subsequent scholarly grappling with
Newton’s alchemy is regrettable for many reasons, particularly
since Dobbs and Westfall raised strong claims about the
relationship of his alchemical endeavors to his physics. In
particular, they suggested that Newton’s concept of force at
a distance was strongly infl uenced by his work in alchemy,
and that it was alchemy above all else that weaned Newton
away from the Cartesian mechanical universe in favor of a
world governed by dynamic interactions operating both at the
macrolevel and the microlevel. Although Dobbs backed away
from these earlier positions in her 1991 Janus Faces of Genius,
she made the equally strong claim there that Newton’s alchemy
was primarily concerned with the operations of a semi-material
ether that acted as God’s special agent in the material world.
Westfall too emphasized the putative connections between
Newton’s religion and his alchemy. Interestingly, the historical speculations of Westfall, Dobbs,
and their popularizers have relatively little to say about the
relationship of Newton’s alchemy to the alchemical tradition
that he inherited. Perhaps because of the underdeveloped state
of the historiography of alchemy in the 1970s, both Westfall
and Dobbs portrayed Newton’s seemingly obsessive interest
in the subject as something exotic that required the help of
extradisciplinary motives to explain it. Hence Dobbs looked
beyond chymistry itself, invoking the aid of Jungian psychology
in her Foundations (1975) and that of Newton’s heterodox
religiosity in her Janus Faces (1991). In neither case did she
see chymistry as a fi eld that might have attracted Newton
on its own merits. Recent scholarship, however, has thrown a
very different picture on alchemy in the seventeenth-century
English speaking world. We now know that Newton’s associate
Robert Boyle was a devoted practitioner of the aurifi c art,
and that the most infl uential chymical writer of the later
seventeenth century, Eirenaeus Philalethes, was actually the
Harvard-trained experimentalist George Starkey, who tutored
Boyle in chymistry during the early 1650s. Boyle’s “literary
executor,” the empiricist philosopher John Locke, was also
deeply involved in chrysopoetic chymistry, and even Newton’s
great mathematical rival, Leibniz, had an abiding interest in the
subject. In short, it was the norm rather than the exception
for serious scientifi c thinkers of the seventeenth century to
engage themselves with chymistry. We need no longer express
amazement at the involvement of Newton in the aurifi c art, but
should ask, rather, how he interacted with the practices and
beliefs of his predecessors and peers in the burgeoning fi eld
of seventeenth-century chymistry. A fi rst step in this endeavor,
obviously, lies in sorting out Newton’s chymical papers and
making them available, along with appropriate digital scholarly
tools, for systematic analysis.
The most recent phase of the project focuses on digital tools,
including a digital reference work based on Newton’s Index
Chemicus, an index, with bibliographic references, to the fi eld
and literature of alchemy. Newton’s Index includes 126 pages
with 920 entries, including detailed glosses and bibliographic
references. Our online reference work edition of Newton’s
Index will not be constrained by Newton’s original structure
and will extend functionality found in traditional print-based
reference works. It will leverage information technologies
such as searching and cross-linking to serve as an access point
to the domain of seventeenth-century alchemy and a portal to
the larger collection and to visualizations that graphically plot
the relative occurrences of alchemical terms, bibliographic
references, and other features of the collection. Other tools
being developed include systems for user annotation of XMLencoded
texts and facsimile page images.
My presentation will look at current progress, developments,
and challenges of the Chymistry of Isaac Newton. With this
project as context, I will venture into more theoretical areas
and examine parallels between alchemy and digital humanities.
For example, like digital humanities, alchemy was an inherently
interdisciplinary fi eld. Bruce T. Moran, in his Distilling Knowlege
describes alchemy as an activity “responding to nature so as
to make things happen without necessarily having the proven
answer for why they happen” (10). This approach has a
counterpart in the playful experimentation and affection for
serendipitious discovery found in much digital humanities work.
Moran also explains that the “primary procedure” of alchemy
was distillation, the principle purpose of which was to “make the
purest substance of all, something linked, it was thought, to the
fi rst stuff of creation” (11). Similarly, much of digital humanities
work is a process of distillation in which visualizations or
XML trees, for instance, are employed to reveal the “purest
substance” of the text or data set. Codes and symbols and
metadata were important parts of the alchemical discipline, as
they are in digital humanities. Alchemy also had a precarious
place in the curriculum. Moran, again, indicates that “although
a sprinkling of interest may be found in the subject within the
university, it was, as a manual art, always denied a part in the
scholastic curriculum” (34). Digital Humanities is likewise often
cordoned off from traditional humanities departments, and its
practice and research is conducted in special research centers,
newly created departments of digital humanities, or in schools
of information science. The idea of the alchemist as artisan and
the digital humanist as technician is another interesting parallel
between the two fi elds. My paper will examine these and other
similarities between the two fi elds and examine more closely
the works of individual alchemists, scientists, and artists in this
comparative context. Alchemy is an interdisciplinary fi eld--
like much digital humanities work--that combines empirical
science, philosophy, spirituality, literature, myth and magic,
tools and totems. I will argue that, as we escape the caricature
of alchemy as a pseudo-science preoccupied with the occult,
alchemy can serve as a useful model for future directions in
digital humanities.
[1]As William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe have
argued in several co-authored publications, it is anachronistic
to distinguish “alchemy” from “chemistry” in the seventeenth
century. The attempt to transmute metals was a normal
pursuit carried out by most of those who were engaged in
the varied realm of iatrochemistry, scientifi c metallurgy, and
chemical technology. The fact that Newton, Boyle, Locke,
and other celebrated natural philosophers were engaged
in chrysopoeia is no aberration by seventeenth-century
standards. Hence Newman and Principe have adopted the
inclusive term “chymistry,” an actor’s category employed
during the seventeenth century, to describe this overarching
discipline. See William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe,
“Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a
Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3(1998),
pp. 32-65. Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the
Historiography of Alchemy,” in William R. Newman and
Anthony Grafton, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
pp. 385-431. References
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy or,
“The Hunting of the Greene Lyon”. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1975.
- --. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the
Scientifi c Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.
Newman, William R. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the
Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Newton, Isaac. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton. Ed. William R.
Newman. 29 October 2007. Library Electronic Text Resource
Service / Digital Library Program, Indiana U. 25 November
2007. <http://www.chymistry.org/>.
Westfall, Richard. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.
White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading:
Addison-Wesley, 1997.