Newton Was "Last of the Magicians"

Newton provides an example of how the idea of "science" had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word "scientist" was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called natural philosophers"^^ in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature. Science had also not fully emerged as a separate concept, but was sometimes thought of as a method or style of study rather than a discretely defined set of disciplines. This was true even into Thomas Jefferson's day. Jefferson himself usually used the word to mean what today we call the hard sciences, but sometimes he used it to refer simply to the rigorous study of other fields, such as the "sciences" of language, mathematics, and philosophy.

By 1663, a time when Puritans were in a decided minority in England, 62 percent^^ of the natural philosophers of the famed Royal Society of London were Puritans,^^ including Newton, who wrote far more on religion and alchemy than he did on science.^^ Newton believed in the inerrancy of scripture, biblical prophecy, and that the apocalypse would come in 2060.^' He was "not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians," said economist John Maynard Keynes,^^ who purchased a collection of Newton's papers in 1936 and was astounded to find more than one million words on alchemy and four million on theology, dwarfing his scientific work.

Newton went on to create calculus and to publish Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,^"^ upon which modern physics was founded.

Eighty-nine years later, Principia was one of the main sources Thomas Jefferson drew upon for inspiration as he sat in the two second-story rooms he had rented from Jacob Graff in Philadelphia, writing the Declaration of Independence.

Notes:

There was a great deal of belief in magic in Newton's writings.

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 Fool Me Twice
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Otto , Shawn Lawrence (2011-10-11), Fool Me Twice, Rodale Press, Retrieved on 2013-01-08
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