Magical Thinking II

Let me resume with something I read the other day: a learned author discussing Newton’s interest in alchemy. This is something I can’t comment on from a scholarly standpoint but the gist of his claim is that Newton’s interest in alchemical writings was ‘scientific’ not ‘magical’. (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-problem-of-alchemy). For instance, he asserts that Newton thought he could explain alchemy on mechanistic principles. Of course the author admits, indeed asserts strongly, that there was no clear line between magic and science in the 17^th century and that we should more properly say that Newton’s interest in alchemy is what we would now call ‘scientific’. This seems plausible enough but the author seems to me to miss another pertinent distinction that makes the question much clearer and simpler. There WAS a clear distinction in the 17^th century only it was not the anachronistic distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘science’. The war in the 17^th Century was between vitalism and mechanism. Thus Newton and an alchemist like Thomas Vaughn might well agree (broadly) on the data of alchemy but Vaughn would invoke living, spontaneous powers in his account of alchemical processes whereas Newton, if the scholar cited above is correct, would explain them in terms of matter in motion with no reference to vital causes. Both accounts would be ‘scientific’ in the broad sense of that term but science under two distinct paradigms or constitutive metaphors. Indeed, Vaughn would be the more conservative of the two thinkers, understanding alchemical data in terms of Hermetic philosophy. This would be the more traditional position at least among interpreters of alchemy though practitioners of an un-reflective sort might, like users of bullet salve, have had no interest in theory whatsoever. On this view Newton would be doing something quite interesting from a theoretical point of view and that is taking data from one paradigm and re-inscribing it in another though his failure to do this might reveal alchemy as something alien to the clockwork universe of the 18^th Century.

Just as an aside there is something I can make a scholarly comment about and that is Dr. Newman’s assertion that Mary Anne Atwood, Victorian Hermeticist, is crucial to our modern concept of ‘magic’ and the ‘occult’ as something distinct from (and perhaps better than!) natural science. I am, along with Pink, perhaps the only person currently in existence who has plowed through Atwood’s Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, an immensely erudite yet diffuse work to be sure that one can forgive anyone for not perusing. I can assure the reader that the distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘science’ posited by Newman is NOWHERE to be found in that work. This I might say more about in my next post.