Newton’s Other Universe
Having been told for two centuries that Newton was pure reason, we have spent eighty years being told that he was secretly a magician, and the second story is enjoying its moment in exactly the way the first one did. It appears in documentaries with low ominous music. It appears in novels, most gloriously in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, where Newton stalks through the seventeenth century as a sort of terrifying polymathic wizard with a coining problem, and it is not wrong, but which is a novel. It appears, degraded through several generations of copying, on the internet, where “Newton was really an alchemist” has become one of those facts that people deploy to demonstrate that official knowledge is a fraud.
Both stories are simplifications, and they are simplifications of the same kind: both assume that we must decide what Newton really was, and that the other material must then be explained away as either an embarrassment or a secret. The possibility that a person might contain intellectual projects that do not resolve into a single identity is not one that biography handles well. Biography wants a spine.
There is a version of this problem that everyone alive now understands in their bones, because everyone alive now generates a record of a kind that no previous century produced. We all have a published self and a search history. Nothing in the human archive prior to about 1995 quite prepares us for the volume of unedited cognition we now leave behind, and I suspect this is one reason the Newton papers feel so charged. To read a man’s private working notes at this scale is an intimacy the eighteenth century could not have imagined and we find entirely familiar. We know just what it would mean to be judged on our drafts.
Kafka asked Max Brod to burn everything, and Brod, who had been told this by a friend who knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t, published it all. Every reader of The Trial is the beneficiary of a broken promise. Nabokov left instructions to destroy the index cards of The Original of Laura, and his son sat on them for thirty years and then brought them out, and they turned out to be — this is the melancholy part — not very good, and their publication tells us mostly that a great writer, dying, wrote like a great writer who was dying. Virgil is said to have wanted the Aeneid burnt. There is a whole genre here, and its moral is uniform: nobody’s last wishes about their papers are ever honoured, and posterity is a thief with a good conscience.
Newton, characteristically, is the exception that complicates the pattern. He did not ask for anything to be burnt. He kept everything. This is a man who preserved his undergraduate notebooks, his accounts, his lists of sins, his failed calculations, his transcriptions of other men’s alchemical recipes, drafts of letters he did not send, and revisions of revisions of a chronology of the ancient kingdoms that nobody had asked him to write. The papers survived because Newton, who trusted no one and told almost nobody anything, could not throw paper away.
He is therefore the patron saint of the edited genius, but the editing was done entirely by other people, and mostly after his death. He handed posterity the complete file. Posterity redacted it and called the result the Age of Reason.
