Showing posts with label Juno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juno. Show all posts

Wednesday 17 August 2016

Juno

Is that for us...?
"Jove's lightnings, the precursors
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake."

What subject can give sentence on his King?
And who sits here that is not Richard's subject?
Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear,
Although apparent guilt be seen in them;
And shall the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy-elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judged by subject and inferior breath,
And he himself not present? O, forfend it, God,
That in a Christian climate souls refined
Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed!


PROSPERO
MIRANDA sleeps
Come away, servant, come. I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel, come.
Enter ARIEL
ARIEL
All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
PROSPERO
Hast thou, spirit,
Perform'd to point the tempest that I bade thee?
ARIEL
To every article.
I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement: sometime I'ld divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. JOVE'S lightnings, the precursors
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-out running were not; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake.
PROSPERO
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
ARIEL
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play'd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the King's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,--then like reeds, not hair,--
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.'
PROSPERO
Why that's my spirit!
But was not this nigh shore?
ARIEL
Close by, my master.
PROSPERO
But are they, Ariel, safe?
ARIEL
Not a hair perish'd;
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,
In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.
The king's son have I landed by himself;
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs
In an odd angle of the isle and sitting,
His arms in this sad knot.
PROSPERO
Of the king's ship
The mariners say how thou hast disposed
And all the rest o' the fleet.

PROSPERO
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted JOVE'S stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.
Solemn music
*********

KING HENRY V
What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By JOVE, I am not covetous for GOLD,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
********

Re-enter Lords, with EXETER and train
KING OF FRANCE
From our brother England?
EXETER
From him; and thus he greets your majesty.
He wills you, in the name of God Almighty,
That you divest yourself, and lay apart
The borrow'd glories that by gift of heaven,
By law of nature and of nations, 'long
To him and to his heirs; namely, the crown
And all wide-stretched honours that pertain
By custom and the ordinance of times
Unto the crown of France. That you may know
'Tis no sinister nor no awkward claim,
Pick'd from the worm-holes of long-vanish'd days,
Nor from the dust of old oblivion raked,
He sends you this most memorable line,
In every branch truly demonstrative;
Willing to overlook this pedigree:
And when you find him evenly derived
From his most famed of famous ancestors,
Edward the Third, he bids you then resign
Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held
From him the native and true challenger.
KING OF FRANCE
Or else what follows?
EXETER
Bloody constraint; for if you hide the crown
Even in your hearts, there will he rake for it:
Therefore in fierce tempest is he coming,
In thunder and in earthquake, like a JOVE,
That, if requiring fail, he will compel;

And bids you, in the bowels of the Lord,
Deliver up the crown, and to take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows' tears, the orphans' cries
The dead men's blood, the pining maidens groans,
For husbands, fathers and betrothed lovers,
That shall be swallow'd in this controversy.
This is his claim, his threatening and my message;
Unless the Dauphin be in presence here,
To whom expressly I bring greeting too.

*******

KING LEAR
I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad:
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:
We'll no more meet, no more see one another:
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;
Or rather a disease that's in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood. But I'll not chide thee;
Let shame come when it will, I do not call it:
I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,
Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging JOVE:
Mend when thou canst; be better at thy leisure:
I can be patient; I can stay with Regan,
I and my hundred knights.

********

KING LEAR
Hear me, recreant!
On thine allegiance, hear me!
Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow,
Which we durst never yet, and with strain'd pride
To come between our sentence and our power,
Which nor our nature nor our place can bear,
Our potency made good, take thy reward.
Five days we do allot thee, for provision
To shield thee from diseases of the world;
And on the sixth to turn thy hated back
Upon our kingdom: if, on the tenth day following,
Thy banish'd trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death. Away! by JUPITER,
This shall not be revoked.
************

Fool
Ha, ha! he wears cruel garters. Horses are tied
by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by
the loins, and men by the legs: when a man's
over-lusty at legs, then he wears wooden
nether-stocks.
KING LEAR
What's he that hath so much thy place mistook
To set thee here?
KENT
It is both he and she;
Your son and daughter.
KING LEAR
No.
KENT
Yes.
KING LEAR
No, I say.
KENT
I say, yea.
KING LEAR
No, no, they would not.
KENT
Yes, they have.
KING LEAR
By JUPITER, I swear, no.
KENT
By JUNO, I swear, ay.
KING LEAR
They durst not do 't;
They could not, would not do 't; 'tis worse than murder,
To do upon respect such violent outrage:
Resolve me, with all modest haste, which way
Thou mightst deserve, or they impose, this usage,
Coming from us.




FADE IN: EXT. THE WHITE HOUSE COLONNADE - DAY 
Bartlet and C.J., along with other aides behind them are walking down the colonnade.

BARTLET 
Galileo V.

C.J. 
Yes, sir.

BARTLET 
Just the name...

C.J. 
Galileo V!

BARTLET 
You can feel the adventure.

C.J. 
Yes, indeed.

BARTLET 
NASA's great at naming things.

C.J. 
They are.

BARTLET 
Mercury, Apollo, Atlantis, the Sea of Tranquility, the Ocean of Storms...

C.J. 
Good names!

BARTLET 
First time I heard 'Galileo V,' the way the imagination immediately... It reminded me of the way folks in my generation felt when we heard "Yellow Submarine."

C.J. 
Okay.

BARTLET 
We really did all want to live in a yellow submarine.

C.J. 
I can't believe they gave you people drivers' licenses.

BARTLET 
Tell me where we're going again.

C.J. 
Mars briefing rehearsal.

BARTLET 
Why?

C.J. 
To rehearse.

BARTLET 
Say the name.

C.J. 
I said the name.

BARTLET 
Say it again. Your imagination, like a child, will explode with unrestrained possibilities for adventure.

C.J. [with gusto] 
Galileo FIVE!

BARTLET 
You didn't say it right.

C.J. 
I said it fine!

BARTLET 
Say it again.

CUT TO: 
INT. MARS BRIEFING REHEARSAL - DAY 
The TelePrompTer shows the name 'Galileo' on it and Sam's head pops up. The crewmembers of the NASA Public Affairs are around the place.

SAM 
Who wrote this intro?

SCOTT TATE 
I did.

SAM 
You're from NASA Public Affairs?

TATE 
Yep.

SAM 
You mind if I give it a polish?

TATE 
Is there a problem?

SAM 
No, it's great. You mind if I change it?

TATE 
I'd prefer if you didn't.

SAM 
Just the same...

TATE 
The Public Affairs has cleared the text. If it's gonna be changed, I'd prefer that the President change it.

SAM 
See, that's kind of what he pays me to do, so...

TATE 
Look, I don't want to step on your toes. You don't want to step on mine. We're both writers.

SAM 
Yes, I suppose, if you broaden the definition to those who can't spell.

TATE 
Excuse me?

Bartlet walks in with C.J.

BARTLET 
Good morning!

EVERYONE 
Good morning, Mr. President.

C.J. Sir, this is the crew from NASA Public Affairs.

BARTLET 
How you doing?

C.J. 
Sir, we're going to run you through the drill for tomorrow morning. First of all, you'll be flanked on either side by the Flight Operations Manager David Narakawa and NASA Chief Administrator Dr. Peter Jobson. On either side of them will be Dr. Samuel Thurman of the Meteorite Analysis team from the Johnson Space Center, and Dr. Joyce Grey-Sutton, Planetary Geologist from Cal State Northridge. On these monitors you'll be seeing the images beamed back from the surface and on this computer screen you'll be able to read the questions being sent in by the kids. 

I strongly urge you...

BARTLET 
Yes.

C.J. 
I strongly urge you...

BARTLET 
I know.

C.J. 
I strongly urge you, Mr. President, to act as moderator and pass the questions of to one of the experts on the panel rather than answer it yourself.

BARTLET 
Yes.

C.J. 
Would you like to see some of the questions?

BARTLET 
We have questions in advance?

C.J. 
Some of them. Would you put them on?

CREWMEMBER [OS] 
Sure.

Bartlet sits on one of the chairs in the front and reads from the computer monitor.

BARTLET 
Katie, sixth grade, Green Oaks Junior High School, Austin, Texas, asks, 
"How old is the planet Mars?
That's a great question, Katie. The planet Mars is 4.6 billion years old.

C.J. 
What did I just say?

BARTLET 
I knew that one.

C.J. 
Nobody likes a know-it-all!

BARTLET 
Yes, God forbid, that while talking to 60,000 public school students, the President should appear smart!

C.J. 
That's fine. Just don't show off.

BARTLET 
I don't show off. 

[reads again

Stevie, fourth grader, PS 31, Manhattan, asks, "What is the temperature on Mars?" 
Well, Stevie, if one of our expert panelists were here, they would tell you the average temperature ranges from 15 degrees to minus 140.

C.J. 
[looking through her papers]
 That happens to be wrong. It ranges from 60 to minus 225.

BARTLET 
I converted it to Celsius in my head.

C.J. 
Thank you.

BARTLET 
Can I see the intro?

SAM 
It's up on the Prompter.

BARTLET 
[reads
"Good morning! I'm speaking to you live from the West Wing of the White House. Today we have a very unique opportunity to take part live in an extremely historic event which..." 
Whoa, boy...

SAM 
[waves and smiles
How you doing, Mr. President?

BARTLET 
Who wrote this intro?

TATE 
I did, sir. I'm Scott Tate from NASA Public Affairs.

BARTLET
 [gets up and shakes his hand]
Scott. 
"Unique" means "one of a kind." 
Something can't be very unique, nor can it be extremely historic.

C.J. 
While we're at it, do we have to use the word "live" twice in the first two sentences like we just cracked the technology?

TATE
Look...

C.J. 
We're also broadcasting in living color, right?

BARTLET 
Sam?

SAM 
Yeah.

BARTLET [to Tate
He's gonna make some changes.

TATE [following Sam
You're going to clear them with me?

SAM 
I doubt it. 
[to a recording staffer

Write this: 

"Good morning. Eleven months ago a 1200 pound spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Eighteen hours ago..."
Is it eighteen hours ago? We're on the air at noon eastern.

C.J. 
Yeah.

SAM 
"Eighteen hours ago it landed on the planet Mars. You, me, and 60,000 of your fellow students across the country along with astroscientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Southern California, NASA Houston, and right here, at the White House, are going to be the first to see what it sees, and to chronicle an extraordinary voyage of an unmanned ship called Galileo V."

BARTLET 
[taps C.J. on the arm] 
He said it right.

C.J. nods.

SMASH CUT TO: MAIN TITLES. 
END TEASER

BUT IT HAS THE WRONG NAME...

"Well this is a new ship. But she's got the right name. Now you remember that, you hear?"

"I will sir."

"You treat her like a lady. And she'll always bring you home."

- Admiral Leonard McCoy and Lt. Commander Data






PROSPERO
I'll deliver all;
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off.
Aside to ARIEL
My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well! Please you, draw near.
Exeunt

EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.


Saturday 23 July 2016

Jupiter - and Beyond the Infinite

"Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
An echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one called us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
Something stirs and something tries
Starts to climb toward the light....

!! OMIGODIT'SFULLOFSTARS !!


Strangers passing in the street 
By chance two separate glances meet 
And I am you and what I see is me. 
And do I take you by the hand 
And lead you through the land 
And help me understand 
The best I can. 

And no one called us to the land 
And no one crosses there alive. 
No one speaks and no one tries 
No one flies around the sun.... 



Almost everyday you fall 
Upon my waking eyes, 
Inviting and inciting me 
To rise. 
And through the window in the wall 
Come streaming in on sunlight wings 
A million bright ambassadors of morning. 

And no one sings me lullabyes 
And no one makes me close my eyes 
So I throw the windows wide 
And call to you across the sky....

Tuesday 19 July 2016

Straight Fibbing : Newton, The Man by John Maynard Keynes

Jupiter Enthroned by Sir Isaac H. Newton

“It is with Pietro Pomponazzi that we see the explicit factional pedigree of the dead souls faction. 

Pomponazzi started from Aristotle, as the Venetian Party always does. 

Aristotle asserted that there is no thought which is not mixed with sense impressions. This meant that there is no part of our mental life which is not contaminated by matter. For Pomponazzi, this proved that the soul does not exist, since it has no immaterial substance. 

Contarini warned Pomponazzi not to take this matter any further, but also remarked that the only time that the existence of the soul is really certain is when the person is already dead. For Contarini, as a practical matter, there is no empirical human soul that you can be aware of while you are still alive.


Francesco Zorzi was the envoy of this group to Henry VIII, to whom he became the resident sex adviser. 

Zorzi illustrates the typical profile of a Venetian intelligence operative in the early 1500s: He was a Franciscan friar whose main occupation was black magic of the Rosicrucian variety. 

He was a conjurer, a necromancer, an apparitionist. 

Think of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and you have the portrait of Zorzi. 

Not exactly a role model for science nerds of any age. 

As the 1500s turned into the 1600s, this profile began to present serious drawbacks and limitations...."

The Philosopher's Stone by Sir Isaac H. Newton



"But this was a dreadful secret which Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life. 

In the main the secret died with him. But it was revealed in many writings in his, big box. 

A hundred years later Sir David Brewster looked into the box. 

He covered up the traces... with some straight fibbing."

John Maynard Keynes,
1946

John Maynard Keynes: Newton, the Man


The Royal Society of London planned an event to celebrate the tercentenary of Isaac Newton's birth in 1942. However World War II made it essentially impossible and the celebrations did not take place until July 1946. Lectures were given by E N da Costa Andrade, H W Turnbull, Niels Bohr and Jacques Hadamard. John Maynard Keynes had also been invited to lecture but unfortunately he died in April 1946, three months before the celebrations took place. Keynes was fascinated by Newton's manuscripts and had been the first person to see some of the manuscript material by Newton which had been kept secret until his papers were sold in 1936. Keynes' lecture, Newton, the man was delivered at the celebrations by his brother Geoffrey Keynes. Here is the text of the lecture:-


Newton, the Man

John Maynard Keynes
It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you today is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.
One other preliminary matter. I believe that Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more extraordinary, than the nineteenth century cared to make him out. Geniuses are very peculiar. Let no one here suppose that my object today is to lessen, by describing, Cambridge's greatest son. I am trying rather to see him as his own friends and contemporaries saw him. And they without exception regarded him as one of the greatest of men.
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. 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 which 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. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
Had there been time, I should have liked to read to you the contemporary record of the child Newton. For, though it is well known to his biographers, it has never been published in extenso, without comment, just as it stands. Here, indeed, is the makings of a legend of the young magician, a most joyous picture of the opening mind of genius free from the uneasiness, the melancholy and nervous agitation of the young man and student.
For in vulgar modern terms Newton was profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type, but - I should say from the records - a most extreme example. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic-with profound shrinking from the world, a paralyzing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world. 'Of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew', said Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair. The too well-known conflicts and ignoble quarrels with Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibniz are only too clear an evidence of this. Like all his type he was wholly aloof from women. He parted with and published nothing except under the extreme pressure of friends. Until the second phase of his life, he was a wrapt, consecrated solitary, pursuing his studies by intense introspection with a mental endurance perhaps never equalled.
I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries. His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary - 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any means of proving'. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they were not the instrument of discovery.
There is the story of how he informed Halley of one of his most fundamental discoveries of planetary motion. 'Yes,' replied Halley, 'but how do you know that? Have you proved it?' Newton was taken aback - 'Why, I've known it for years', he replied. 'If you'll give me a few days, I'll certainly find you a proof of it' - as in due course he did.
Again, there is some evidence that Newton in preparing the Principiawas held up almost to the last moment by lack of proof that you could treat a solid sphere as though all its mass was concentrated at the centre, and only hit on the proof a year before publication. But this was a truth which he had known for certain and had always assumed for many years.
Certainly there can be no doubt that the peculiar geometrical form in which the exposition of the Principia is dressed up bears no resemblance at all to the mental processes by which Newton actually arrived at his conclusions.
His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already.
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 mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty - just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.
He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end, uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing-all by himself, no interruption for God's sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things, creeping back into the bosom of the Godhead as into his mother's womb. 'Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone', not as Charles Lamb 'a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle'.
And so he continued for some twenty-five years. In 1687, when he was forty-five years old, the Principia was published. 
Here in Trinity it is right that I should give you an account of how he lived amongst you during these years of his greatest achievement. The east end of the Chapel projects farther eastwards than the Great Gate. In the second half of the seventeenth century there was a walled garden in the free space between Trinity Street and the building which joins the Great Gate to the Chapel. The south wall ran out from the turret of the Gate to a distance overlapping the Chapel by at least the width of the present pavement. Thus the garden was of modest but reasonable size. This was Newton's garden. He had the Fellow's set of rooms between the Porter's Lodge and the Chapel - that, I suppose, now occupied by Professor Broad. The garden was reached by a stairway which was attached to a veranda raised on wooden pillars projecting into the garden from the range of buildings. At the top of this stairway stood his telescope - not to be confused with the observatory erected on the top of the Great Gate during Newton's lifetime (but after he had left Cambridge) for the use of Roger Cotes and Newton's successor, Whiston. This wooden erection was, I think, demolished by Whewell in 1856 and replaced by the stone bay of Professor Broad's bedroom. At the Chapel end of the garden was a small two-storied building, also of wood, which was his elaboratory. When he decided to prepare the Principia for publication he engaged a young kinsman, Humphrey Newton, to act as his amanuensis (the MS. of the Principia, as it went to the press, is clearly in the hand of Humphrey). Humphrey remained with him for five years - from 1684 to 1689. When Newton died Humphrey's son-in-law Conduitt wrote to him for his reminiscences, and among the papers I have is Humphrey's reply.
During these twenty-five years of intense study mathematics and astronomy were only a part, and perhaps not the most absorbing, of his occupations. Our record of these is almost wholly confined to the papers which he kept and put in his box when he left Trinity for London.
Let me give some brief indications of their subject. They are enormously voluminous - I should say that upwards of 1,000,000 words in his handwriting still survive. They have, beyond doubt, no substantial value whatever except as a fascinating sidelight on the mind of our greatest genius.
Let me not exaggerate through reaction against the other Newton myth which has been so sedulously created for the last two hundred years. There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical. They were nearly all composed during the same twenty-five years of his mathematical studies. They fall into several groups.
Very early in life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity. At this time the Socinians were an important Arian sect amongst intellectual circles. It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or sceptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents give no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications. The revealed God was one God.
But this was a dreadful secret which Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life. It was the reason why he refused Holy Orders, and therefore had to obtain a special dispensation to hold his Fellowship and Lucasian Chair and could not be Master of Trinity. Even the Toleration Act of 1689 excepted anti-Trinitarians. Some rumours there were, but not at the dangerous dates when he was a young Fellow of Trinity. In the main the secret died with him. But it was revealed in many writings in his, big box. After his death Bishop Horsley was asked to inspect the box with a view to publication. He saw the contents with horror and slammed the lid. A hundred years later Sir David Brewster looked into the box. He covered up the traces with carefully selected extracts and some straight fibbing. His latest biographer, Mr More, has been more candid. Newton's extensive anti-Trinitarian pamphlets are, in my judgement, the most interesting of his unpublished papers. Apart from his more serious affirmation of belief, I have a completed pamphlet showing up what Newton thought of the extreme dishonesty and falsification of records for which St Athanasius was responsible, in particular for his putting about the false calumny that Arius died in a privy. The victory of the Trinitarians in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century was not only as complete, but also as extraordinary, as St Athanasius's original triumph. There is good reason for thinking that Locke was a Unitarian. I have seen it argued that Milton was. It is a blot on Newton's record that he did not murmur a word when Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair, was thrown out of his professorship and out of the University for publicly avowing opinions which Newton himself had secretly held for upwards of fifty years past.
That he held this heresy was a further aggravation of his silence and secrecy and inwardness of disposition.
Another large section is concerned with all branches of apocalyptic writings from which he sought to deduce the secret truths of the Universe - the measurements of Solomon's Temple, the Book of David, the Book of Revelations, an enormous volume of work of which some part was published in his later days. Along with this are hundreds of pages of Church History and the like, designed to discover the truth of tradition.
A large section, judging by the handwriting amongst the earliest, relates to alchemy - transmutation, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life. The scope and character of these papers have been hushed up, or at least minimized, by nearly all those who have inspected them. About 1650 there was a considerable group in London, round the publisher Cooper, who during the next twenty years revived interest not only in the English alchemists of the fifteenth century, but also in translations of the medieval and post-medieval alchemists.
There is an unusual number of manuscripts of the early English alchemists in the libraries of Cambridge. It may be that there was some continuous esoteric tradition within the University which sprang into activity again in the twenty years from 1650 to 1670. At any rate, Newton was clearly an unbridled addict. It is this with which he was occupied 'about 6 weeks at spring and 6 at the fall when the fire in the elaboratory scarcely went out' at the very years when he was composing the Principia - and about this he told Humphrey Newton not a word. Moreover, he was almost entirely concerned, not in serious experiment, but in trying to read the riddle of tradition, to find meaning in cryptic verses, to imitate the alleged but largely imaginary experiments of the initiates of past centuries. Newton has left behind him a vast mass of records of these studies. I believe that the greater part are translations and copies made by him of existing books and manuscripts. But there are also extensive records of experiments. I have glanced through a great quantity of this at least 100,000 words, I should say. It is utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to it. Some time it might be interesting, but not useful, for some student better equipped and more idle than I to work out Newton's exact relationship to the tradition and MSS. of his time.
In these mixed and extraordinary studies, with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science, Newton spent the first phase of his life, the period of life in Trinity when he did all his real work. Now let me pass to the second phase.
After the publication of the Principia there is a complete change in his habit and way of life. I believe that his friends, above all Halifax, came to the conclusion that he must be rooted out of the life he was leading at Trinity which must soon lead to decay of mind and health. Broadly speaking, of his own motion or under persuasion, he abandons his studies. He takes up University business, represents the University in Parliament; his friends are busy trying to get a dignified and remunerative job for him - the Provostship of King's, the Mastership of Charterhouse, the Controllership of the Mint.
Newton could not be Master of Trinity because he was a Unitarian and so not in Holy Orders. He was rejected as Provost of King's for the more prosaic reason that he was not an Etonian. Newton took this rejection very ill and prepared a long legalistic brief, which I possess, giving reasons why it was not unlawful for him to be accepted as Provost. But, as ill-luck had it, Newton's nomination for the Provostship came at the moment when King's had decided to fight against the right of Crown nomination, a struggle in which the College was successful.
Newton was well qualified for any of these offices. It must not be inferred from his introspection, his absent-mindedness, his secrecy and his solitude that he lacked aptitude for affairs when he chose to exercise it. There are many records to prove his very great capacity. Read, for example, his correspondence with Dr Covell, the Vice-Chancellor when, as the University's representative in Parliament, he had to deal with the delicate question of the oaths after the revolution of 1688. With Pepys and Lowndes he became one of the greatest and most efficient of our civil servants. He was a very successful investor of funds, surmounting the crisis of the South Sea Bubble, and died a rich man. He possessed in exceptional degree almost every kind of intellectual aptitude - lawyer, historian, theologian, not less than mathematician, physicist, astronomer.
And when the turn of his life came and he put his books of magic back into the box, it was easy for him to drop the seventeenth century behind him and to evolve into the eighteenth-century figure which is the traditional Newton.
Nevertheless, the move on the part of his friends to change his life came almost too late. In 1689 his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, died. Somewhere about his fiftieth birthday on Christmas Day 1692, he suffered what we should now term a severe nervous breakdown. Melancholia, sleeplessness, fears of persecution - he writes to Pepys and to Locke and no doubt to others letters which lead them to think that his mind is deranged. He lost, in his own words, the 'former consistency of his mind'. He never again concentrated after the old fashion or did any fresh work. The breakdown probably lasted nearly two years, and from it emerged, slightly 'gaga', but still, no doubt, with one of the most powerful minds of England, the Sir Isaac Newton of tradition.
In 1696 his friends were finally successful in digging him out of Cambridge, and for more than another twenty years he reigned in London as the most famous man of his age, of Europe, and - as his powers gradually waned and his affability increased - perhaps of all time, so it seemed to his contemporaries.
He set up house with his niece Catharine Barton, who was beyond reasonable doubt the mistress of his old and loyal friend Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been one of Newton's intimate friends when he was an undergraduate at Trinity. Catharine was reputed to be one of the most brilliant and charming women in the London of Congreve, Swift and Pope. She is celebrated, not least for the broadness of her stories, in Swift's Journal to Stella. Newton puts on rather too much weight for his moderate height. 'When he rode in his coach one arm would be out of his coach on one side and the other on the other.' His pink face, beneath a mass of snow-white hair, which 'when his peruke was off was a venerable sight', is increasingly both benevolent and majestic. One night in Trinity after Hall he is knighted by Queen Anne. For nearly twenty-four years he reigns as President of the Royal Society. He becomes one of the principal sights of London for all visiting intellectual foreigners, whom he entertains handsomely. He liked to have clever young men about him to edit new editions of the Principia - and sometimes merely plausible ones as in the case of Facio de Duillier.
Magic was quite forgotten. He has become the Sage and Monarch of the Age of Reason. The Sir Isaac Newton of orthodox tradition - the eighteenth-century Sir Isaac, so remote from the child magician born in the first half of the seventeenth century - was being built up. Voltaire returning from his trip to London was able to report of Sir Isaac - 'twas his peculiar felicity, not only to be born in a country of liberty, but in an Age when all scholastic impertinences were banished from the World. Reason alone was cultivated and Mankind could only be his Pupil, not his Enemy.' Newton, whose secret heresies and scholastic superstitions it had been the study of a lifetime to conceal!
But he never concentrated, never recovered 'the former consistency of his mind'. 'He spoke very little in company.' 'He had something rather languid in his look and manner.'
And he looked very seldom, I expect, into the chest where, when he left Cambridge, he had packed all the evidences of what had occupied and so absorbed his intense and flaming spirit in his rooms and his garden and his elaboratory between the Great Gate and Chapel.
But he did not destroy them. They remained in the box to shock profoundly any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century prying eyes. They became the possession of Catharine Barton and then of her daughter, the Countess of Portsmouth. So Newton's chest, with many hundreds of thousands of words of his unpublished writings, came to contain the 'Portsmouth Papers'.
In 1888 the mathematical portion was given to the University Library at Cambridge. They have been indexed, but they have never been edited. The rest, a very large collection, were dispersed in the auction room in 1936 by Catharine Barton's descendant, the present Lord Lymington. Disturbed by this impiety, I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including nearly the whole of the biographical portion, that is, the 'Conduitt Papers', in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America, on the occasion of the recent tercentenary.
As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand - with an understanding which is not, I hope, distorted in the other direction - this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at the time when within these walls he. was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind Copernicus and Faustus in one.

JOC/EFR March 2006
The URL of this page is:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html




[A Grove.]



Enter FAUSTUS to conjure


  Faust.  
Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth

Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look,

Leaps from the antarctic world unto the sky,

And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,
Faustus, begin thine incantations,

And try if devils will obey thy hest,

Seeing thou hast pray’d and sacrific’d to them.

Within this circle is Jehovah’s name,

Forward and backward anagrammatis’d,
The breviated names of holy saints,

Figures of every adjunct to the Heavens,

And characters of signs and erring 1 stars,

By which the spirits are enforc’d to rise:

Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,
And try the uttermost magic can perform.

  Sint mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete! Orientis princeps Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appareat et surgat Mephistophilis. Quid tu moraris? per Jehovam, Gehennam et consecratum aquam quam nunc spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facio, et per vota nostra, ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis! 2

Enter 
[MEPHISTOPHILIS] 
a DEVIL

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;

Thou art too ugly to attend on me.
Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;

That holy shape becomes a devil best.  
[Exit DEVIL

I see there’s virtue in my heavenly words;

Who would not be proficient in this art?

How pliant is this Mephistophilis,
Full of obedience and humility!

Such is the force of magic and my spells.

[Now,] Faustus, thou art conjuror laureat,

Thou canst command great Mephistophilis:

Quin regis Mephistophilis fratris imagine. 3
Re-enter MEPHISTOPHILIS 
[like a Franciscan Friar]

  Meph.  
Now, Faustus, what would’st thou have me to do?

  Faust. 
 I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live,

To do whatever Faustus shall command,

Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere,
Or the ocean to overwhelm the world.

  Meph.  
I am a servant to great Lucifer,

And may not follow thee without his leave

No more than he commands must we perform.

  Faust.  
Did not he charge thee to appear to me?
  Meph.  
No, I came hither of mine own accord.

  Faust.  
Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? Speak.

  Meph.  
That was the cause, but yet per accidens;

For when we hear one rack 4 the name of God,

Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,
We fly in hope to get his glorious soul;

Nor will we come, unless he use such means

Whereby he is in danger to be damn’d:

Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring

Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity,
And pray devoutly to the Prince of Hell.

  Faust.  
So Faustus hath

Already done; and holds this principle,

There is no chief but only Belzebub,

To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself.
This word “damnation” terrifies not him,

For he confounds hell in Elysium; 5

His ghost be with the old philosophers!

But, leaving these vain trifles of men’s souls,

Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord?
  Meph.  
Arch-regent and commander of all spirits.

  Faust.  
Was not that Lucifer an angel once?

  Meph.  
Yes, Faustus, and most dearly lov’d of God.

  Faust.  
How comes it then that he is Prince of devils?

  Meph.  
O, by aspiring pride and insolence;
For which God threw him from the face of Heaven.

  Faust.  
And what are you that you live with Lucifer?

  Meph.  
Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,

Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer,

And are for ever damn’d with Lucifer.
  Faust.  
Where are you damn’d?

  Meph.  
In hell.

  Faust.  
How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

  Meph.  
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

O Faustus! leave these frivolous demands,

Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
  Faust.  
What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate

For being depriv’d of the joys of Heaven?

Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,

And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.

Go bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurr’d eternal death

By desperate thoughts against Jove’s deity,

Say he surrenders up to him his soul,

So he will spare him four and twenty years,

Letting him live in all voluptuousness;
Having thee ever to attend on me;

To give me whatsoever I shall ask,

To tell me whatsoever I demand,

To slay mine enemies, and aid my friends,

And always be obedient to my will.
Go and return to mighty Lucifer,

And meet me in my study at midnight,

And then resolve 6 me of thy master’s mind.

  Meph.  
I will, Faustus.  

Exit.

  Faust.  
Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I’d give them all for Mephistophilis.

By him I’ll be great Emperor of the world,

And make a bridge through the moving air,

To pass the ocean with a band of men:

I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore,
And make that [country] continent to Spain,

And both contributory to my crown.

The Emperor shall not live but by my leave,

Nor any potentate of Germany.

Now that I have obtain’d what I desire,
I’ll live in speculation 7 of this art

Till Mephistophilis return again.  
Exit.


Note 1. Wandering. [back]
Note 2. “Be propitious to me, gods of Acheron! May the triple deity of Jehovah prevail! Spirits of fire, air, water, hail! Belzebub, Prince of the East, monarch of burning hell, and Demogorgon, we propitiate ye, that Mephistophilis may appear and rise. Why dost thou delay? By Jehovah, Gehenna, and the holy water which now I sprinkle, and the sign of the cross which now I make, and by our prayer, may Mephistophilis now summoned by us arise!” [back]
Note 3. “For indeed thou hast power in the image of thy brother Mephistophilis.” [back]
Note 4. Twist in anagrams. [back]
Note 5. Heaven and hell are indifferent to him. [back]
Note 6. Inform. [back]
Note 7. Study. [back]