![]() This view can be summed up by analytical psychologist Carl Jung’s statement that alchemy largely resembled “psychic processes expressed in pseudo-chemical language,” implying that something other than scientific or even material goals was the main driving force behind the aurific art. When Keynes wrote that Newton’s alchemical experimentation was an attempt “to imitate the alleged but largely imaginary experiments of the initiates of past centuries” and that it is “utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value,” he was in fact echoing a commonly held view of alchemy as a whole. Keynes’s pronouncement faithfully presented not only the conventional view of Newton as a rationalist but also the mainstream view of alchemy among historians of science during the mid-twentieth century. The thrust of Keynes’s address was that the conventional view of Newton as a “rationalist, one who had taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason,” was not quite right and that the truth was more complicated: one of the greatest scientists of all time spent a large part of his most creative years on various unscientific quests, including a search for that most elusive of alchemical substances, the philosophers’ stone. 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 build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. The Book of Nature, the Book of Scripture.
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