How To Be An Agnostic
precision in our observations, partly to gain as high-quality
pictures as we could, and partly then to examine those images
closely and select the best representative features for study.
Many of Newton’s contemporaries were into alchemy for
reasons of money, not faith. They were paid to research and
hoped to reap the rewards of the Midas touch. However, Newton
was part of a long tradition that was critical of the merits and
even the possibility of such base alchemic aims. In 1627, Francis
Bacon wrote about the ‘making of gold’ in his Naturall Historie
in ten Centuries, lamenting how alchemy too often nurtures
‘vanities’, ‘superstitions’ and ‘forgeries’. He preferred a more
altruistic alchemy that valued experimentation for the benefi ts
it brought to the world at large, not for its profi ts. A similar atti-
tude was adopted a generation before Newton by Robert Boyle,
often called the father of modern chemistry. In his book, The
Sceptical Chymist, he laid out his loathing of the grasping obscu-
rantism often associated with alchemy. He shows great apprecia-
tion for ‘adepts’ and later thought that he was close to turning
quicksilver into gold. However, his call was for discipline, clarity
and the full reporting of investigations.
In these more moral assessments of alchemy can be seen a
concern for its spiritual, not material, signifi cance. This higher
tradition saw alchemy as a framework in which the trans-
formation of the alchemist was as signifi cant an aim as the
transmutation of matter. The Philosopher’s Stone – the myste-
rious substance that is the common ingredient to all alchemic
concerns – was aligned with love, a love that searched creation.
The quest for the perfect metal, gold, was taken as an allegory of
the perfection of humanity. Rather like the search for the holy
grail, that presumably many knew would and could never be
actually found even as they committed themselves to it, these
pursuits were valued for the way they took the devotee to the
limits of knowledge, in a synthesis of the scientifi c and the spir-
itual. It nurtured a sense of integration by underlining the fact
that there was always more to explain. It nurtured a sense of
wonder by emphasising the tremendousness of the cosmos. It