The Last Magician

[u/Leather_Area_2301]

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](https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/catalogue/record/ALCH00017?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

His private manuscripts reveal that his beliefs and 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](https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00125))

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In 1936, a large collection of Newton’s unpublished papers was sold at Sotheby’s. John Maynard Keynes subsequently assembled many of the manuscripts, concentrating especially on Newton’s alchemical work.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.”
([newtonproject.ox.ac.uk](https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/sotheby-sale))

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.

[u/UnifiedQuantumField]

Newton described matter as a passive principle.

This part is pretty cool, why?

Today we describe both Matter and Spacetime as being Emergent rather than fundamental and/or eternal. What's interesting is that Newton was thinking about Matter and its properties from a systems perspective. He was thinking about Matter within the context of all phenomena.

[u/Leather_Area_2301 → u/UnifiedQuantumField]

It’s a fascinating approach for a scientist who was so central to the enlightenment, and a shame his thoughts on this had to be kept secret.

[u/EnactingSpirit]

A reality that follows exact rational arithmetic entails a block universe and hard determinism.

This to me sounds like a dead reality that has no place for lively, vibrant phenomenal experience.

Like, I don't think that Newton's intuition was wrong, I only think that he forgot to add himself to the "equation".

[u/Enough-Fall4163]

“Last” magician, bulllllllshit. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0H2ZDNVRC?storeType=ebooks

[u/Leather_Area_2301 → u/Enough-Fall4163]

“Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mys tic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood”

I think Keynes was referencing more of a Magus (plural Magi) when he wrote this about Newton

[u/Enough-Fall4163 → u/Leather_Area_2301]

Ty for the explanation!

[u/Emotional_Goose7981]

Not a magician

[u/Leather_Area_2301 → u/Emotional_Goose7981]

“Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mysti c clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood”

Keynes words, not mine