The Last of the Magicians
Sir Isaac Newton used mathematics to describe motion, gravity, and the predictable laws of mechanics.
He also translated and annotated the Emerald Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. (newtonproject.ox.ac.uk)
His private manuscripts reveal that his theological, alchemical, and Hermetic interests helped shape the kinds of questions he was willing to ask about nature.
Newton described matter as a passive principle. It could remain at rest or continue in motion, but it could not move itself. Yet he believed this alone could not explain a world filled with attraction, chemical transformation, biological growth, and intentional movement.
In one unfinished draft, he wrote:
“Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.”
Newton then wondered whether all space might be the ‘sensorium of a thinking being’, and whether laws arising from life or will might therefore extend throughout the universe. In the same manuscript, he considered the forces through which microscopic bodies attract one another and asked whether they deserved to be counted among the general laws of motion alongside gravity. (newtonproject.ox.ac.uk)
Newton was asking an extraordinary question:
Could mind, life, chemistry and cosmic motion be different expressions of deeper active principles running throughout nature?
Hermeticism may have encouraged Newton to imagine the universe as a living and interconnected whole. His scientific instincts then transformed that vision into questions that could be approached through observation, experiment and mathematical reasoning.
In 1936, a large collection of Newton’s unpublished papers was sold at Sotheby’s. John Maynard Keynes subsequently assembled many of the manuscripts, concentrating especially on Newton’s alchemical work. After studying them, Keynes wrote:
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that 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.”
Modern science limits itself when it starts with the materialistic assumption of discrete 3 dimensional objects interacting in a 3 dimensional universal space.
Sir Isaac Newton’s example leaves me wondering whether the science of the future might recover something of his wider vision: a science in which matter, life, mind, and the cosmos are studied not as sealed and unrelated categories, but as parts of one connected nature.
If reality is truly an interconnected whole, it cannot be stitched together from disconnected parts or arbitrary rules. Instead, it must emerge from a singular, uncorrupted geometric origin.
Imagine a framework built on absolute structural exactness, requiring zero arbitrary axioms or free parameters.
Just as Newton suspected an active, universal principle running throughout nature, this approach views all complexity, – from the fundamental forces of physics, to the architecture of cognition - as exact, deterministic extensions unfolding from a single, continuous source.
By relying on exact rational arithmetic and unbroken mathematical geometries, it becomes possible to strip away the chaotic infinities and floating approximations that currently plague our physical equations.
This is would be a philosophical return to the Hermetic concept of "the One,"; a rigorous, mathematically verifiable evolution of it.
A closed-loop reality where matter, life, and cosmic motion are not sealed categories, but mathematically exact derivations of the very same underlying fabric.