Newton

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This is the final lecture in this particular series and the next series will go back before this series and establish the 14th century origins, The Mystical Century, and in order to initiate that particular century I'm going to go one step back before it and take a very famous Persian mystic, Rumi, Jalaluddin Rumi, to set the stage for the 14th century. The 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, especially the 12th and the 13th, owe their élan vital as Bergson would call it to the insights of the Arabic mind. And it's very important to establish that as a natural context. All of the tremendous insight in European mentality of those centuries owe their roots to the Arabic mind which had become quite cosmopolitan, had spread from Spain to India, and was really the best of the civilized outlook of the world at the time. So that series begins with Rumi and then we'll go all the way up to Thomas a Kempis who lived until 1471. In other words he lived until Ficino had already established the Florentine Academy. So that'll be an interesting course I think in giving us the background, and then following that I'll take this course forward starting again with Isaac Newton and I'll try to present at that time a little more detailed meaningfulness in terms of the calculus and in terms of the actual alchemy. I'll go into more of the science at that time and that course will go from Newton to William Blake. And it takes the 18th century and develops the tremendous dichotomy that had risen between science and religion, between the spirit and rationality. And we'll see figures like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, the Comte de Saint-Germain, the whole cast of characters, Diderot, and Gibbon, and it will conclude with William Blake.

So this course comes as the transformative fulcrum between two eras that on the surface are totally different and yet are intimately related with each other. And this particular course will have established the transformation between the two poles as they're called polar opposites the world of matter and the world of spirit. And it's appropriate to conclude this particular development this particular course with the figure of Sir Isaac Newton because he stands as a beacon receiving from what had gone before him and integrating into such a powerful new pattern of expression that his thought literally dominates the next 200 years of thought. And up into our own century, our own time, Newton's view of the world is dominant. What has escaped attention until just the last decade or so is the fact that wrapped up with Newton's worldview and the Newtonian universe is also the Hermetic integration which he made and which was transferred to those intervening centuries intact but the interpretation, the flat one-sided interpretation of Newton, produced in the schools and in the sciences a rather truncated view of what they were dealing with. And yet all the time was the living integration which Newton had made and this is why constantly whenever there was a new phase of exposition, a new transformative plateau reached, and new creative energies and science released there was a concomitant spiritual mystical effulgence. So that we will see when we get to the course from Newton to Blake that Blake at the end of the century into the 18th century looks back and points his finger poignantly to Sir Isaac Newton and in fact does a great illustration of the naked Newton bent over like the primordial animal with the mathematical calipers making the circles and the coordinates of intelligence upon the tabula rasa of the earth. Of course his eyes contain the mysteries.

And it's interesting because it's in the human eye that the transformation is most apparent. In fact the basic insight of the place of the human eye in terms of assessment of the physical universe and in terms of its appraisal of the function and order of universal mathematical laws owes a great deal to a person that we have not taken in the course but at some other time we'll have to take up in extenso. That person is Johannes Kepler. Kepler was an individual who was born quite early in the scientific game of very poor parents, he was given an education by virtue of the Dukes of Wittenberg making available education for sons of destitute parents. And Kepler, by the 1590s, had become a mathematical professor. And one day while lecturing on the series of platonic forms, the five basic platonic solids - the pyramid, the cube, the dodecahedron, the icosahedron - the five basic platonic solid forms, Kepler had a flash of insight that there were six planets and there were five platonic solids. There were no more no less. There were six planets no more no less and that there were five spaces in between the six planets and that somehow the platonic solids were a cue to a progressive order visually in the universe. And he never let go of that insight. And later on when he became, by invitation, the assistant to Tycho Brahe in Prague, outside of Prague, Kepler finally having access to the decades of wonderfully accurate astronomical records that Brahe had kept, was able to work out a mathematical series for himself on the placement of the planets in a platonic order and from this derived the three laws of fundamental mathematical physics which were later on to influence our Sir Isaac Newton.

While doing this work Kepler realized that light comes from a point and it reaches the human eye and in the circle of the pupil of the human eye, and its geometric form with the point of light, makes a form of a conic section strung out through the universe to whatever we see. So that the eye is the base of a cone leading back to the point of light. And that the eye on the inside has an inner cone that focuses the image to a point in the eye where the mind perceives it. So that the eye of man is the transparency by which the form of the exterior universe recreates the interior architecture of vision. And that since there is a geometrical series and a mathematical progression in the exterior universe, that that is equally true with the interior architecture of vision.

Now this later on would be extremely influential on Newton when he would begin to consider alchemy and the transformation of matter and how man views this transformation. But now we have to go to Sir Isaac Newton and catch ourselves up to the point to where this would be intelligible as a realization. Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in Lincolnshire. His father, a very poor individual, had died three months before he was born. So Newton came into the world very very precariously. He had no father. He had a mother. But he was such a small baby that he records in one of his writings that had they of not propped his head up it probably would have just fallen off his shoulders. His way of writing this was to a friend John Conduitt. “Sir Isaac Newton told me that he had been told that when he was born he was so little they could put him into a quart pot. And so weakly that he was forced to have a bolster all round his neck to keep it on his shoulders. And so little likely to live that when two women were sent to Lady Pakenham at North Witham for something for him they sat down on a stile by the way and said there was no occasion for making haste for they were sure the child would be dead before they could get back.

So this weakly, sickly child born with his father already dead in 1642 on Christmas Day. By the time that Sir Isaac was three his mother remarried. The new stepfather was a fairly well-to-do reverend, a minister, named Smith - Barnabas Smith - whose previous wife had just died and he lost no time in searching around for a new wife, didn't really approach Hannah Ayscough which was the name of Newton's mother Hannah Ayscough Newton didn't approach her himself but had an intermediary go and ask her if she'd be amenable to this. And she said if my brother is willing I would just as soon get married again but on condition that you leave some property to my young son Isaac. Well the marriage went through, but the stepfather refused to take little Isaac Newton into his house. He was a busy minister and a man of the world and he liked the idea of having another woman to take care of him. He didn't like the idea of having a weak little three year old around the house. So his grandparents the Ayscough’s accepted little Isaac Newton and he had lost his mother. This was a tremendous trauma for the young boy and much has been made out of this. And I think really we can safely say that a lot of the instability in terms of the later propensity to rage in the face of criticism to the urge for almost ultimate isolation from everyone else whenever there was a problem to think about are characteristics that perhaps have a great deal of their root in this trauma for the little three year old.

In fact in this wonderful biography of Isaac Newton, Never At Rest by Richard Westphal, which just came out this year, he lists in here, “the loss of his mother must have been a traumatic event in the loss of a fatherless boy of three. There was a grandmother to replace her to be sure but significantly Newton never recorded any affectionate recollection of her whatever. Even her death went unnoticed. As we shall see Newton was a tortured man, an extremely neurotic personality who teetered always at least through middle age on the verge of breakdown.”

I think this is a little excessive and I would rather amend this to be heard in this way. Newton was an extraordinary intelligence. And his intelligence focused itself upon issues in the transformation from a static world order to a kinetically active indeterminate dynamic world order. And that whenever a mind is schooling the feeling tone base to accept this world of motion there seems to be a correlative instability in terms of static relationality and the external world. So that, I think this is rather a more intelligent appraisal for his condition. At any rate the young boy, being raised by the grandparents, spent most of his time by himself and the one recompense to him was that he inherited the two or three hundred books that his grandfather, Robert Newton, had collected. His father had as a young man made a great huge notebook to list all the quotations he was going to take out of his father's library and the blank sheets of paper of this notebook which Newton Sir Isaac Newton later called the waste paper, was left blank until Sir Isaac himself filled them with his mathematical calculations at Cambridge. So the father really was not much of one to have read anything. But little Sir Isaac, in the presence of the library, the volumes, daydreaming with them and attempting on his own to find some way to relate to the world began to become an acute observer of the changes in material and character around him.

His stepfather died when he was about ten and his mother came back to the house. He was fairly well provided for by the grandparents in terms of property - some estates and so forth. He would actually inherit a manor with properties throughout Lincolnshire. When the mother came back it was only a year and a half before Sir Isaac was sent off to school. He had been taught by his mother who had changed in the medium of the second marriage to considering Sir Isaac as the possible heir for the properties and to be an overseer for the properties. But it was observed in that year and a half of scrutiny to see if he was going to measure up that the boy had become a dreamer and therefore unfit to really be entrusted with managing the properties. Thus he was sent off to school at a nearby school which had little to offer except a background in Latin. And the young Sir Isaac was again left alone. Grantham is the name of the village where the school was and incidentally Grantham was also the birthplace of one of the great Cambridge Platonists named Henry More - M-O-R-E - who would later on be one of the mentors of Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge University. So there was a connection in the budding but little discovered until some 20 years later when the boy was sent there. He was 12 years old. He was quite a bit older than other students and in fact instead of paying attention to his studies he was last on the list of those in his class. He spent a lot of his time making little toys and mechanical gadgets. He made small dolls for the little girls in the school. And at this time someone was building a windmill outside of town and the little 12 year old Isaac Newton observed the construction of this windmill close enough so that he made a little scale model of this windmill Which could actually be set out in the wind and would work. But then he also made a little treadmill which could power this windmill with putting a little mouse in the treadmill. And so Isaac began to make his inventions. And of course it drew attention to him and he realized that he liked to also be in the public eye. And when he realized that being last on the list academically was a real fault he set himself to studying and within a couple of months was first in his class. This was to be a pattern in his life. Newton as a young sober thinking lad, as he has been called, was given a place to stay in Grantham, and this is the way that Westphal records it in Grantham. “Newton lodged with the apothecary Mr. Clarke whose house stood on the High Street next to the George Inn. Also living in the house were three stepchildren of Mr. Clarke named Storers from his wife's first husband. A girl whose first name has been lost and two boys. It seems clear that Newton did not get along with the boys and so forth but for the little girl he made dolls and this was one of the few women that he got along with in his life this little girl when he was a student in Grantham.

He was given an incomplete education. But because of his drive and his tenacity Newton decided that he would like to go to Cambridge University which at that time was about 3000 students. Later on persons in their travel memoirs would record that coming from Europe. Cambridge was such a small tawdry dirty little town. But for Sir Isaac coming from these little tiny hamlets in Lincolnshire Cambridge with about six or seven thousand people and a three thousand student university was a big place, it was the big time. And he enrolled as what they would call at that time a student who was very very poor - they would call them sizars. Cisars would be those students who'd be admitted on the basis that they would be servants to the more affluent students who would be there and this way they would earn their keep. Well Newton was admitted as a sub-sizar the lowest on the pecking order. And this is amazing because his mother would have had an estimated seven hundred pounds income every year from the accrued estates. She never sent him more than ten pounds in any one year so that the mother resented the fact that Newton was maturing away in his isolation from her apron strings. And so we find that there's not just the tack of missing having parents but there's the active transcending by forced genius and intelligence of even the need to have them. And this is I think poignant and characteristic of Isaac Newton's personality.

Whenever there was a conundrum in life which challenged him and he began to feel a tension, a sense of limbo in himself as a person, he would concentrate his mind incessantly until he would find a synthesis to transcend the problem, thus not just solving the problem on its terms, but dissolving the conditions which had made the problem in the first place. This is one of the root sources of Newton's genius. It was a terrible strain on him but let us not forget that he lived 84 years with this strain and became the foremost mind in the Western world with all that. When he was sent to Cambridge then he entered as a sub-sizar as one of the least of the students. When the affluent students had finished eating the sizars would finish the leftovers and the sub-sizar when they were washing up the dishes and so forth would have the scraps and crumbs. He seemed to exist on this, but he realized that he would have to do something for himself. He began to study his lessons and Newton seemed to show right away some promise although he skipped many of the basic texts so that later on when he would be examined by one of his great encouragers, a man named Isaac Barrow, he would be asked questions on Euclid and really would not have read Euclid but would have mastered Descartes's geometry. And it was thought that one would have to master Euclid before you could read Descartes. But Newton very often simply jumped over eons of development. And this of course would show itself later on quite a bit. He was earning his keep then as a menial servant.

In the summer of 1662 shortly after Newton was admitted within a year or so, as Westphal records, “in the summer of 1662 when he was 19 years old Newton underwent some sort of religious crisis.” It's unspecified, it's never made clear. But I'll do the best I can for you. Westphal records, “at least he felt impelled to examine the state of his conscience one whit-sunday to draw up a list of his sins before that date and to start a second list of those committed thereafter.” And among the list of sins that he drew up was the compulsion to burn up his parents and the house over them. All the other sins that are listed by him are sins like, forgetting to say prayers, being laxed in meaning, his prayers when he did say them. He did not keep the Lord's day, He was making inventions on Sunday idle discourse on certain days, this kind of item.

Newton at 19 having come into a new transformative situation and facing the tension of that new situation was going not into a religious crisis but was going into his inner world of envisioning in order to create a solution to dissolve the problems that had come up and this was characteristic of his personality and characteristic of his method. It is not pointed out in any of the literature that I've come across on Newton but I rather think this is the case. The way that he expressed his resolution out of that solution was to coordinate by lists and by categorizing all of the information and all of the conclusions that he had come to. So that the process ran like this. He would develop into a certain phase of life until that was filled and then when he would move to another phase, a higher phase of development, he would experience that within a year or so as a confrontation, as a tension. And in order to deal with that he would go back inside of himself, in an isolation, cutting his ties in the outer world, would envision a comprehensive solution to it all and then would make an expression in a resolution of the categorical form the shape of understanding arrived at, and that would be the new basis for the personality of Isaac Newton. So that he was a progressive chameleon in the sense of his personal development, of not so much scrapping the old Isaac Newton, the younger one which had just proved ineffective because it had run into situations it couldn't handle, but simply dissolving the old and reconstituting a new one. And I think this was the form of his life and in this you can recognize the alchemist in human relations at work spontaneously, untaught.

Well they record this as a kind of a mental breakdown. I think this is just a lack of appreciation for the inner transformation of character on these levels. This is not to denigrate the great scholars, Westphal and people like this are tremendous, it's just that understanding these kinds of transformations takes a special kind of insight. Now Newton then having come out of this at the age of 20 realized with his new self, with his new rules for operating, that he was going to have to excel at Cambridge University, and in order to excel he was going to have to pick out a couple of areas to concentrate in. So that these areas of expertise would give him a handle on the situation. It was in this period of 1662 that he began to acknowledge mathematics and geometry. Now it's interesting that Newton was born in the same year that Galileo died so that the flow was almost continuous in terms of a life process. And with Kepler and Descartes and Galileo, many of the basic foundations for a revolution in scientific thought had been delivered, had been expressed but they had not been seen because they were as yet hidden by the unpreparedness of minds of that time to coordinate these perceptions, to coordinate these writings together, and to synthesize them into a new vision.

So Newton is arriving at a rendezvous with destiny. The elements are there; The building blocks are there; The alphabet is already extant. What it needed was a transformative grammar which would be provided by the insight of Newton in order to engender a new expression of the cosmos. Now, he was there at Cambridge and in this he realized that in the past the giants of philosophy in the ancient world had been Plato and Aristotle and that in fact Aristotle's thought was still the main course of academic philosophy at Cambridge. And he began to keep a notebook which in abbreviated title is always called The Questions, The Questions. And in this notebook at the very beginning in Latin, Newton inscribed it, “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is Truth.”

And so the dedication at that time of the new formative basis of Isaac's personality was to discern for himself what was true in thought. And of course the areas that he picked out for himself to specialize in were geometry and mathematics and later on physics. At this time his reading began to include a number of authors who we have lost sight of today but one in particular should be mentioned, a man named Gassendi who did a lot of work on the theory of gases and expansions and so forth at that time. Paramount for Newton's mind was the notion in Gassendi that there is a primordial, atomic structure to reality. That there are ultimate particles out of which everything is made and that it is the movement of this atomic structure that actually gives us the variety of the universe. Now this is a little different from the kind of mechanical geometry that Descartes was writing about at this time. Descartes basic philosophic notion was that the universe had been created, complete, mechanically efficient, and that it was running with this mechanical efficiency from here on out. The atomism was a little different from this because it gave a chance for the notion to come in that there was a manipulable substance capable of undergoing transformation so that there were new and perhaps organic structures available in the universe. At least this kind of insight would have begun to tinge the thought of Newton about this time in the mid 1660s.

He was at this time brought into a possibility that he would not be able to continue at Cambridge. There were only a certain number of individuals who were continued and in order to continue he would have to pass an exam, an oral exam, and he would have to produce some writings. And if he was able to pass these tests he could then have some sort of a quasi-position at least at Cambridge. And the man who was interviewing him for this was quite a famous man of his day, a man named Isaac Barrow, who later on became Sir Isaac Barrow. He was reportedly a little indifferent about Newton's learning and background. The first thing he quizzed him on was Euclid and Newton simply didn't know how to express himself. He had not read The Elements with any great attention. But Barrow who also worked on alchemical experiments sensed in the Newton who was now 22, 23, 24 years old sensed in the Newton of that time of the early 20s a rising capacity at understanding. In other words, it was becoming apparent that this was an extraordinary individual that perhaps he did not have the traditional academic background. He couldn't pass a true and false exam, in other words. But he had an élan vital in him that was creating an overview and a penetrating series of insights and Barrow was just the man to have intuited that and understood that. And in fact within five years he was noting certain impasses in Newton's philosophic and mathematical development when he was writing the beginning of his great articles and often would send him just the book that he needed to break the impasse in intellectual thought. So Barrow was an insightful older man capable of discerning in the young Newton a comer as we would say in our language today.

One of the overriding conceptions pervading Newton's thought at this time was that of perpetual motion machines. Many of his early notebooks at this time are filled with drawings and calculations. And to recognize the value of this and the significance we have to consider now what would be a perpetual motion machine? It would be some manifest mechanical way of translating into time-space via motion a universal substance which would not be static, but which would have integral to its nature a periodic fluctuation generating energy and creating a sine wave structure of force. And this was the beginning of Newton's great transformation of mind from the mechanical world view where everything refined itself down to smaller and smaller mechanisms so that physically there was always something in touch with something else, a causality of contact, to the perception that there might be influence at a distance which would entail the conception of force. So that in place of mechanical contact there would be the beginnings of the intuition that the universe is run by interpenetrating forces and that man may capture these forces through contrivances not only mechanical inventions but mathematical formulations. And that by having focused them and brought them into manifestation man would have produced a way to change the universe.

So that Newton's alchemy had at its very beginnings even before it manifested itself in terms of chemistry, a physics of force at a distance. And in these notebooks all of these wonderful perpetual motion machines show the young genius really starting to grapple with this problem. And of course as the problem became more real to him it occurred to the personality of Newton that he had moved into a new transformative phase. He was no longer the sub-sizar at the university, but he was someone who was coming of age and perhaps going to have a position at the university. And recognizing this it became a point of confrontation and the inner tensions rose. And so Newton had the beginnings of the propensity to withdraw into himself to create a new solution to this new situation, this new problem. Interestingly enough this time there was a parallel in history, a parallel in nature, to the inner developments for Newton. He had a good reason for leaving Cambridge. Cambridge was closed down because of an outbreak of plague and for two years Cambridge University was closed. And so Newton went back to his home and spent the time, thinking, envisioning. It was a convenient point of withdrawal for him. He would have done it anyway I think. But this fit in with the circumstance. And it was at this time that Newton's inner comprehension seemed to, in this third transformation of his life, take a quantum jump in capacity. He began to really understand that there were implications through an area, through a volume. And this true for mathematical theory but also transferable and applicable to the universe of time-space. So that the kinetic motion of any mass through space has a concomitant force which can be calculated exactly and understood. And this began to occur to Newton stronger and stronger. And of course as that conception matured in him very rapidly - you have to realize that as Newton went into these transformative periods he just, because of his capacity to throw away the old conceptions just suddenly blossomed. All of the new conceptions occurred to him almost simultaneously so that he literally transformed rather than grew.

By the time Cambridge opened in 1667, two years later, Newton had a chair, he had a position there. In fact it was Isaac Barrow that made sure that Newton was one of his successors. So Newton brought into this position and also confirmed that is to say Isaac Barrow's judgment of him was confirmed by one of the great men of the day, one of the great savants of Cambridge University, this man Henry More - M-O-R-E. Maybe we should have a little digression on Henry Moore.

Moore is called along with a friend of his named Cudworth one of the Cambridge Platonists. Moore was born in 1614. He was born the same year that the Fama Fraternitatis was published. Moore was born in the same area that Sir Isaac was born, Lincolnshire - Lincolnshire. He was given a chance to attend Cambridge University and by the time he was 25 he was already assured of a position there. He was enormously talented. His writing capacity for exact formulation as a young man was almost impeccable. It is noted in many assessments of his thought that later on in life he sacrificed the intellectual exactness for a more poetic effusiveness and at the end of his life he died in 1687, they brought together a lot of his writings on divine intuition and published them in 1688, and this is one of the most influential works of Neoplatonic thought in the English tradition. The divine institutions of Henry More. But More, as an individual very much like Newton, in that he did not like to overextend himself. He didn't like to be put in positions where he was not at home. And so when he found a niche at Cambridge University he stayed there. He rejected all the other preferments that would come his way and in fact chose more and more to withdraw from the world of ambition so that he would have more time and more leisure and more capacity to enjoy his inner world. And in fact he fell in with a group of hermeticists who centered themselves around a woman. Her name was Conway, Lady Conway, who owned an estate named Ragley in Warwickshire. Lady Conway was initially a student of Henry More at Cambridge. She later on became a Quaker and was a great friend of William Penn. So she knew a great many of the esotericists of her day and her estate at Ragley was a place where many of them came to collect, and to walk with each other through the forests and the woods of her estate, and a great tremendous amount of work was done there. There were a lot of alchemical experiments conducted there. There were many conversations, much in the manner of Ficino and the Medicean Gardens in the old Platonic Academy sense. And out of this Henry More was really the genius of the lot. William Penn would become the great religious writer of that group but Henry More was really the intellectual genius.

So he had taken the young Isaac Newton somewhat under his aegis in the 1660s, and all the way through the 1670s at Cambridge while Newton was building for himself a reputation as being a man of mathematics, a man of science More was appealing to his sense of dissolve and coagulate, his sense of transformative restructuring which was a natural hermetic movement. More and Barrow before him were influencing Newton to examine the Hermetic mode, the Hermetic methodology, of transforming material into its constituent, the prima materia, the universal materia. One of the first ways in which Newton conceived this and it was characteristic of his time was that there must be some basic ether which lay behind the universe of form. And it was not until the 1670s when he began to experiment with alchemy. He began to see for himself, create the star Regulus, the crystalline condensation of antimony, antimony, that the basic quality of the Hermetic secret was that it gathered in a focal the qualities of light and made them into a manifest unity. So that Newton began to conceive in his mind just about the time he was undergoing another transformation that perhaps the basic aether of the universe was light, and that if one could just simply understand light exactly in all of its transformative capacities, one may just have the handle on the whole situation. In other words he was moving away from chemistry into physics. And of course as he moved into the physics of light, he moved also into the mechanics of optics, and the key universal language within which he could express himself was mathematics transformed now into differential and integral calculus.

So with the encouragement of people like Henry More the Neoplatonist, and Isaac Barrow, and others, Newton began to consider in himself whether there was not something for him to deal with here. And he began to take the blank pages of his father's notebook that he had never filled, the waste paper, and he set down 45 headings under which to organize the fruits of his reading. This is according to Westphal, “beginning with general topics on the nature of matter, place, time, and motion.” You see he's hitting all the major points. These are topic headings which he would then contemplate on and investigate on and experiment on. “...place, time, motion, matter, and proceeding to the cosmic order and then down to a large number of tactile qualities such as rarity, fluidity, softness, followed by questions on violent motion, occult qualities, light, colors, vision, sensation in general, and finally concluding with a set of miscellaneous topics not all of which appear to have been in the initial list.” The title Questions was given to the whole outfit and Westphal concludes Newton had left the world of Aristotle forever. In fact he was very quickly leaving the world of his century.

He was very quickly entering into the new world of thought and physics. He was at this time approaching 30 years of age. He would live another 54 years when he found himself gaining stability again having gained tenacity in his new transformed worldview Newton began to gain confidence and he wrote a series of papers which he then submitted to the Royal Society in London thinking that it was high time perhaps that he as the new Isaac Newton be admitted to the Royal Society. When these papers were received, the Royal Society was quite glad to have them, there were some inventions to be shown with them. In fact Newton had made the first reflecting telescope. Now there had been refractory telescopes, but this was a reflecting telescope. And this has to be understood rather clearly. Newton had taken Kepler's eye and had taken it out of the human form and had made an instrument to become a more refined eye than man's eye could ever become. The reflecting telescope reproduced Kepler's eye in an invention. And what it did was it gathered the conic section of light from the universe and made visible for all so that they could share the experimental quality of vision together in a mechanical invention of the reflecting telescope which gathered light onto a surface. So there's that quality. Making an invention to extend man's capacity, and then raise the amplitude of his capacity so that it became exponential. That was one point.

Another point was that Newton had understood that there are limits because of the nature of light, because of the nature of the phenomenon, to what a glass could pick out or an eye could pick out, so that by taking the instrument out of the human form one could tinker with various aspects of it and its improvement would be a matter of plan. So that man's intelligence took over the improvement of the organs of his investigation so that natural philosophy had become natural science in one swift comprehensive motion. Newton took this first reflecting telescope to the Royal Society, he was an instant sensation. Within a year they made him a member and Newton began to really draw raves. He was 30 years old. He was a genius. And of course there were aggressive personalities in the Royal Society who took umbrage at this young upstart coming in. One of them was Robert Hooke who said this man has taken my calculations and called them his own. And of course the volatile Sir Isaac Newton blew up in a rage, almost a psychotic fit, and was not only wanting to lambast Robert Hooke in print and perhaps verbally, but wanted to grind the man's paltry conceptions into dust by just overdoing it.

But what was difficult was that he was so consumed by his reactive rage towards this man in this condition that he withdrew into himself. And this time Newton had set himself a very difficult transformation to base his personal tension upon. He had set himself to understanding the whole movement of natural science and its basic principles in force in light motion. So he had made a conundrum for himself which could only be solved by inventing Newtonian physics. It was the only solution available. And so Newton, withdrawing into himself, at this time began to work with alchemy. He began to work with alchemical experiments. But it was not so much the alchemy of wanting to see what happened chemically, or with what happened philosophically, but it was with that transformed hermetic determination to understand what happens. What really transpires in this universe? And so Newton began to drive himself with this incredible single-mindedness. Someone asked him once, “How did you come upon your great theories?” And he said, “by thinking about them continuously, day and night, week in week out, year after year no let up.”

And with this obsessiveness he began to find his way. Now this particular transformation needs to have one point made I think a little clearer. We don't have time to go into Descartes exclusively but I think there's one element there that needs to be pointed out, singled out for you and later on in your time and in your way go after this because this is the key. This is the hangnail on Descartes's hand. And if you keep pulling at it you'll create the sore that Newton created and you'll never again be fooled by the wonderful mechanical categories that seem to baffle so many people. The word is vortice, vortice. And in Descartes's philosophy there is a concept of whirlpools of manifestation, the vortices. And one of the best descriptions of these vortices and Descartes's thought comes from a paragraph from An Introduction to Selections from Descartes by a man named Eaton, R. M. Eaton, that he records here, “the Cartesian,” that's from Descartes, “the Cartesian picture of this world is bold and complete since the creation the world of extended bodies has been nothing but a vast machine and so forth. But there is no need of calling in the force or attraction of Galileo to account for specific kinds of motion still less. The active powers of Kepler all happen in accordance with the regularity precision inevitability of a smoothly running machine. How could the facts of astronomy and of terrestrial gravity be accounted for in a way which would not do havoc with this beautifully simple hypothesis? Only by regarding the objects of our study as swimming helplessly in an infinite ether, or first matter, to use Descartes's own term,” first matter, “which being vaguely and not at all mathematically conceived. Descartes was able to picture as taking on forms of motion that rendered the phenomena explicable. This primary matter forced into a certain quantity of motion, divinely bestowed, falls into a series of whirlpools or vortices.”

“Matter falls into a series of whirlpools or vortices in which the visible bodies such as planets or terrestrial objects are carried around or impelled toward certain central points by the laws of vortical motion.” So you have vortices and of course primary to conceiving them is that they must have a center. And of course because their motion is perfect from creation it must have circular motions and capacities. “Hence the bodies thus carried can be conceived as purely mathematical. They possess no qualities but those deducible from extension and free mobility in the surrounding medium. The world is pictured concretely as material rather than as spiritual, as mechanical rather than teleological,” and so the stage is set.

Newton, in coming into a period of great tension and transformation, having set for himself now trying to understand matter, force, light, space, the primaries of physics, came upon the understanding - and in a nutshell I guess I could describe it this way - that if the order of the universe holds, not with circles but with ellipses, then one has conclusive proof that Descartes's mechanical view is unconfirmable by natural science. So that Newton began to study the motions of planetary bodies with an eye towards discerning, are they circular or are the motions the orbits of planetary bodies elliptical? And when he discovered in Kepler's calculations that it was provable that they were elliptical Newton had the beginning insight that he had cracked the universal mode that was predominant in his day. Then he began to apply himself with characteristic Newtonian fervor and with, I might add, characteristic hermetic transformative logic to expanding this. So that the question of motion became paramount for Newton.

Descartes had thought that motion is simply carried mechanically by light. That it is light that connects mechanically throughout the universe, and that motion is carried then by light. And this of course became a point with Newton. If the reality of light consists of motion transmitted by a material medium, then the qualitative theories of the past must be transposed into quantitative experiments of the present. Because light consists of color, and color, when experimented with - as Newton was doing all the time at this time - color is the core the key the clue to the analytic decipherment of light and thus of motion. And the series of stages that color goes through are the cues to the whole process. Newton called it a fluxion, so that the theory of fluxions, the theory of processes, the theory of physics, of understandable theory in terms of light and color and motion, all began to devolve on a series of experiments which Newton then began to carry out in tandem with his alchemical experiments of making the star Regulus out of the crystal of antimony.

Newton began the experiments which he was to publish in the next century under the title of Optics. And these experiments began about the middle of the 1670s and in fact the whole first book of the Optics was really written about 1676, and the second book of the Optics was really written before he wrote the Principia about 1685, 1686. So that even though the Optics is published later and is added on to when it is published, it really is the formative basis for understanding what resolution Newton was coming to in the 1670s. And he was transforming for the fourth time, and he was coming into a maturity that only one other person at his time could understand and appreciate. And that other person was Leibniz.

Newton in his Optics records meticulously sitting in a darkened room with a little hole a third of an inch bored into the frame, the window, and a prism set in it - and I don't, I guess we're running out of time so I don't have time to go through. I selected out about ten passages to give you a precis of the argument of the Optics. You'll have to just get it yourself and I'll give you the designations. But what happened in dealing experimentally with prisms, and with light - and he would take two prisms and he would put them in tandem. And then he would put them in series and notice that you could break light down into what he called rays, and then you couldn't go any further with those rays so that the series of those rays was the analytical key to the quantification of the universe. And he began to develop a mathematics to express this, and a geometry to express this, and a series of inventions to manifest this.

And so almost single-handedly, and certainly to himself exclusively, Newton built modern science, but he didn't publish it. He circulated in manuscript to a few select friends what he had written. Then he was visited by one of the members of the Royal Society, a great man in his day, a man named Halley, for whom we get Halley's Comet. Halley visited Newton in 1684 and he was bothered by a question that had come up in his calculations and he was unable to deal with it sufficiently so that he made a trip to Cambridge University and Newton by this time was the man. He was becoming the scion of science and philosophy, not only at Cambridge, but in the world at the time. So he came to him with a question and he wanted to know about the motion of certain bodies under certain conditions. And in a book by I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia, Professor Cohen gives this a memorial.

“The history of the Principia begins with a definite event: a trip from London to Cambridge to see Newton made by Edmund Halley, one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, famous today primarily for his contributions to astronomy and for the comet named after him, but then also considered an able geometer. The date is 1684, in August, Newton age 41, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge and a fellow, known at large for his published discoveries concerning light and color but admired by the cognoscenti for his work in mathematics, not yet published but circulated and he had a fundamental understanding of dynamics unequaled by anyone at that time except for Leibniz. During the visit Halley asked Newton what path the planets would describe if they were continually attracted by the sun with a force varying inversely as the square of the distance. Newton replied, naturally, that the path would be an ellipse. This was not guesswork on Newton's part,” writes Professor Cohen, “but the result of all the mathematics that he had been working on.”

So that Halley's comet drew out of him the recognition that all his time he had affected not just a personal resolution to questions which had been bothering him but that he had in the meantime inadvertently solved the major intellectual problem of his time. And so Newton began to bring all of his observations and all of his writings together and as he did he realized that here he had all the parts needed for reconstructing, in terms of mathematical theory, and contemporary physics, the star Regulus of alchemy in a new form.

And so he worked for the next 2 or 3 years, and in 1687 was published, the first edition of Newton's Principia, the Mathematical Principia of Natural Philosophy. It was the most epochal book published in Europe of that whole age. Newton's Principia in one fell swoop not only shattered and dissolved the old world views, but created the reverberation in his contemporaries that they were on the verge of a revolution in human thought. And in fact, they would call their time after this, “The Enlightenment,” and that all that had gone before them was simply medieval guesswork, dark ages. Not so much that those people before them had been stupid but that they had been ignorant of the actuality of the universe. And now they were in possession of a key to it. Twice more during his life Newton would publish revised versions of the Principia again in 1713 the second edition would come out, and right at the end of his life, he died in 1727, he published the great third edition of the Principia and after 40 years of work was just monumentally put together. It was built by mathematical bricks that had been lodged into place so neatly that they are still in place in our own time.

In this development at that time, in 1687 when the first edition of the Principia came out its import was so momentous that only one man in Rome at that time reading it realized the implications. And this was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. And Leibniz, reading the Principia, realized that Newton independently had come to similar conclusions to himself but by a totally different notation and so with great glee and excellence of character Leibniz wrote a detailed synopsis of the Principia and sent this off to Newton. And of course when it came, Newton couldn't see what tremendous genius it would have taken to create a synopsis of his work. He only saw the fact that some stranger over there was trying to steal his thunder. And for the next 25 years of his life Leibniz would be the pet scapegoat for Newton. He would be absolutely convinced that Leibniz was in fact the devil's own come to try and steal his thunder. And ever after, whenever Newton would be writing an particularly difficult passage in one of his works he would take a paragraph out to castigate Leibniz, the dirty so and so.

So this quality of Newton's character was unfortunate. What wonders would have come had Newton and Leibniz been able to put themselves together in a protracted conversation for that 25 years? We might have had the theory of relativity before we had all the complications of the French Revolution. But it didn't happen and the confrontation was there. The two great hermetic minds of their time working in different ways, with similarities that were so close that the one thought the other was stealing directly from him couldn't envision the fact that they had come like twins out of the same tradition, couldn't realize that they were like the two parts of a tuning fork that had come into a harmonia of understanding about how the universe moves through light and its varigations of rays to create what we call the material realm. It was not to be poor Newton.

Towards the end of his days, he became the president of the Royal Society in 1703, published the Opticks in 1704, was the lion of the intellectual world. Leibniz of course died unknown in 1716. At the time of the third edition of the Principia. Newton had a young protégé named Pemberton, Henry Pemberton, who wrote a great critique for the non-mathematical specialists in 1728. In fact it's the only one to really read and copies of it are available for $450 if you can find them. I found one in town here and no one wants to buy it at $450. But in that volume Pemberton actually makes clear the enormous import of Newton's vision of how matter transforms itself through energy. And had Pemberton's expressions been understood by the 18th century Occultists, we would not have had all of the time wasting phony societies that came to the fore. But they assumed because they were put off by the mathematics because they couldn't get into the science of it, they couldn't be brought to see that the scientific worldview actually had a whole spiritual undertone to it. They began to recoil from it and like spoiled brats said these people don't know what they're talking about, they're materialists. And of course the same kind of reaction happened from the scientific and mathematical community. These people know nothing. They don't even take the time to learn the fundamentals. And so a great schism arose and the European psyche - a needless time-wasting schism - which would remain polarized until our own time, until the 20th century.

Well it will take at least two more series. One to go back before this series to develop the mysticism that underlies it all, and then another series to develop the intellectual structure that was built upon that schism, because at the end of that structure, built upon that schism, are the American and French revolutions and they are directly related. And the whole politics of the modern nation-state conundrum is all related to this misunderstanding at the transformative core of the Hermetic tradition about the 1680s, 1690s.

Well we have to stop there, we're out of time.