NEWTON: A CULTIST KOOK
The next phase of the corruption of science by Venice depends on a rather obscure Cambridge don by the name of Isaac Newton. For the oligarchy, Newton and Galileo are the only two contenders for the honor of being the most influential thinker of their faction since Aristotle himself. The British oligarchy praises Newton as the founder of modern science. But, at the same time, they have been unable to keep secret the fact that Newton was a raving irrationalist, a cultist kook. Among the oligarchs, it was the British economist Lord John Maynard Keynes and a fellow Cambridge graduate who began to open the black box of Newton’s real character. Was Newton the first and greatest of the modern scientists, the practitioner of cold and untinctured reason? No, said Keynes, 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 wonderful child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage. Keynes based his view on the contents of a box. What was in the box? The box contained papers which Newton had packed up when he left Cambridge for London in 1696, ending his Cambridge career and beginning his new life in London as member and president of the British Royal Society, director of the mint, resident magus of the new British Empire.
Inside the box were manuscripts and papers totaling some 1.2 million words. After Newton’s death, Bishop Horsley was asked to inspect the box, with a view to publication, but when he saw the contents, he recoiled in horror and slammed the lid. A century passed. Newton’s nineteenth-century biographer, Sir David Brewster, looked into the box. He decided to save Newton’s reputation by printing a few selections, but he falsified the rest with straight fibbing, as Keynes says. The box became known as the Portsmouth Papers. A few mathematical papers were given to Cambridge in 1888. In 1936, the current owner, Lord Lymington, needed money, so he had the rest auctioned off. Keynes bought as many as he could, but other papers were scattered from Jerusalem to America.
As Keynes points out, Newton was a suspicious, paranoid, unstable personality. In 1692, Newton had a nervous breakdown and never regained his former consistency of mind. Pepys and Locke thought that he had become deranged. Newton emerged from his breakdown slightly “gaga.” As Keynes stresses, Newton “was wholly aloof from women,” although he had some close young male friends. He once angrily accused John Locke of trying to embroil him with women.
In the past decades, the lid of the box has been partially and grudgingly opened by the Anglophile scholars who are the keepers of the Newton myth. What can we see inside the box?
First, Newton was a supporter of the Arian heresy. He denied and attacked the Holy Trinity, and therefore also the Filioque and the concept of Imago Viva Dei. Keynes thought that Newton was “a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides,” which suggests that he was a Cabalist. For Newton, to worship Christ as God was idolatry and a mortal sin. Even in the Church of England, Newton had to keep these views secret or face ostracism.
ALCHEMY AND GREEN LIONS
Newton’s real interest was not mathematics or astronomy. It was alchemy. His laboratory at Trinity College, Cambridge was fitted out for alchemy. Here, his friends said, the fires never went out during six weeks of the spring and six weeks of the autumn. And what is alchemy? What kind of research was Newton doing? His sources were books like the “Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum” of Elias Ashmole, the Rosicrucian leader of British speculative Freemasonry. Newton owned all six heavy quarto volumes of Ashmole.
The goal of the alchemists was the quest for the mythical philosopher’s stone, which would permit the alchemist to transmute lead and other base metals into gold. The alchemists hoped the philosopher’s stone would give them other magical powers, such as rejuvenation and eternal youth.
That's Sir Isaac Newton's personal illustration of The Philosopher's Stone.
Alchemy also involved the relations between the astrological influences of the planets and the behavior of chemicals. One treatise that dealt with these issues was the “Metamorphosis of the Planets.” Since the planet Jupiter had precedence among the planets, it also occupied a privileged position among the reagents of alchemy. Newton expressed this with a picture he drew of Jupiter Enthroned on the obverse of the title page of this book.
Jupiter Enthroned
by Sir Isaac Newton
What were Newton’s findings? Let him speak for himself: “Concerning Magnesia of the green Lion. It is called Prometheus & the Chameleon. Also Androgyne, and virgin verdant earth in which the Sun has never cast its rays although he is its father and the moon its mother. Also common mercury, dew of heaven which makes the earth fertile, nitre of the wise. Instructio de arbore solari. It is the Saturnine stone.” This would appear to have been written in the 1670s. A sample from the 1690s: “Now this green earth is the Green Ladies of B. Valentine the beautifully green Venus and the green Venereal emerald and green earth of Snyders with which he fed his lunary Mercury and by virtue of which Diana was to bring forth children and out of which saith Ripley the blood of the green Lyon is drawn in the beginning of the work.”
During the 1680s Newton also composed a series of aphorisms of alchemy, the sixth of which reads as follows: “The young new born king is nourished in a bigger heat with milk drawn by destellation from the putrefied matter of the second work. With this milk he must be imbibed seven times to putrefy him sufficiently and then dococted to the white and red, and in passing to the red he must be imbibed with a little red oil to fortify the solary nature and make the red stone more fluxible. And this may be called the third work. The first goes on no further than to putrefaction, the second goes to the white and the third to the red.” (Westfall, pp. 292, 293, 358).
And so it goes for more than a million words, with Green Lions, Androgynes, male and female principles, Pan and Osiris. Truly it has been said that Newton had probed the literature of alchemy as it had never been probed before or since, all during the time he was supposedly writing his Principia Mathematica. In addition, he drew up plans for King Solomon’s Temple, and later a chronology of Biblical events which foreshortened that history by cutting out several hundred years.
NEWTON’S “DISCOVERIES”
And what about Newton’s supposed discoveries? Upon closer scrutiny, it turns out that he had no discoveries. Take, for example, Newton’s alleged law of universal gravitation, which states that the force of attraction of two point masses is equal to the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them, times a constant. This is Newton’s so-called inverse square law. It has long been known that this was not really a new discovery, but rather derived by some tinkering from Kepler’s Third Law. Kepler had established that the cube of a planet’s distance from the Sun divided by the square of its year always equaled a constant. By supplementing this with Huygens’s formula for centrifugal acceleration and making some substitutions, you can obtain the inverse square relationship. This issue is settled in the appendices to The Science of Christian Economy [by Lyndon LaRouche, Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991]. But the partisans of Newton still claim that Newton explained gravity.
By opening the lid of the box, we find that Newton himself confesses, in an unpublished note, that his great achievement was cribbed from Kepler. Newton wrote: “…I began to think of gravity extending to the Orb of the Moon and (having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving presses the surface of a sphere) from Kepler’s rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve….” (Westfall, 143). Newton “arrived at the inverse square relation by substituting Kepler’s Third Law into Huygens’s recently published formula for centrifugal force” (Westfall, 402). Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren claimed to have done the same thing at about the same time.
Newton’s love of alchemy and magic surfaces as the basis of his outlook, including in his supposed scientific writings. In his “Opticks,” he asks, “Have not the small particles of bodies certain powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance…. How those attractions may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by Impulse, or some other means unknown to me.” This is Newton’s notion of gravity as action at a distance, which Leibniz rightly mocked as black magic. Newton’s system was unable to describe anything beyond the interaction of two bodies, and supposed an entropic universe that would have wound down like clockwork if not periodically re-wound. Newton also wrote of an electric spirit, and of a mysterious medium he called the ether. What the basis of these is in alchemy is not clear.
Then there is the story of Newton’s invention of the calculus. In reality, Newton never in his entire life described a calculus. He never had one. What he cooked up was a theory of so-called fluxions and infinite series. This was not a calculus and quickly sank into oblivion when it was published nine years after Newton’s death. By 1710, European scientists had been working with Leibniz’s calculus for several decades. It was about that time that Newton and the British Royal Society launched their campaign to claim that Newton had actually invented the calculus in 1671, although for some strange reason he had never said anything about it in public print during a period of 30 years. This was supplemented by a second allegation, that Leibniz was a plagiarist who had copied his calculus from Newton after some conversations and letters exchanged between the two during the 1670s. These slanders against Leibniz were written up by Newton and put forward in 1715 as the official verdict of the British Royal Society. The same line was churned out by scurrilous hack writers directed by Newton. But scientists in continental Europe, and especially the decisive French Academy of Sciences, were not at all convinced by Newton’s case. Newton’s reputation on the continent was at best modest, and certainly not exalted. There was resistance against Newton in England, with a hard core of 20-25% of anti-Newton feeling within the Royal Society itself. How then did the current myth of Newton the scientist originate?
NEWTON: THE APOTHEOSIS OF A CHARLATAN
The apotheosis of Newton was arranged by Antonio Conti of Venice, the center of our third grouping of the dead souls faction. In order to create the myth of Newton as the great modern scientist, Conti was obliged to do what might well have been considered impossible at the time: to create a pro-British party in France. Conti succeeded, and stands as the founder of the Enlightenment, otherwise understood as the network of French Anglophiles. Those Frenchmen who were degraded enough to become Anglophiles would also be degraded enough to become Newtonians, and vice versa. The British had no network in Paris that could make this happen, but the Venetians did, thanks most recently to the work of such figures as Montaigne and Pierre Bayle. What the British could never have done, the Venetians accomplished for the greater glory of the Anglo- Venetian Party.
Born in Padua in 1677, Conti was a patrician, a member of the Venetian nobility. He was a defrocked priest who had joined the Oratorian order, but then left it to pursue literary and scientific interests, including Galileo and Descartes. Conti was still an abbot. In 1713, Conti arrived in Paris. This was at the time of the Peace of Utrecht, the end of the long and very bitter War of the Spanish Succession, in which the British, the Dutch, and their allies had invaded, defeated, and weakened the France of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Louis XIV had only two more years to live, after which the throne would go to a regent of the House of Orleans.
In Paris, Conti built up a network centering on the philosopher Nicholas de Malebranche. He also worked closely with Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, the permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, still the premier research center in Europe. Conti saw immediately that Fontenelle was a follower of Giordano Bruno of the Ridotto Morosini. Conti become a celebrity in Paris, but he soon announced that he was growing tired to Descartes, the dominant figure on the French intellectual scene. Conti began telling the Paris salons that he was turning more and more to Newton and Leibniz. He began to call attention to the polemic between Newton and Leibniz. What a shame that these two eminent scientists were fighting each other! Perhaps these two outlooks could be reconciled. That would take a tactful mediator, an experienced man of the world. Since the English and the German scientists were at war, who better than an Italian, a Venetian, to come forward as mediator? Perhaps such a subtle Venetian could find a way to settle this nasty dispute about the calculus and propose a compromise platform for physics.
A solar eclipse was in the offing, and Conti organized a group of French astronomers to go to London and observe it – probably the London fog would be helpful. With Conti’s help these Frenchmen would be turned, made members of the Royal Society, and when they got back to France, they would become the first French Anglophiles of the eighteenth century French Enlightenment. Before leaving Paris, Conti, with classical Venetian duplicity, wrote a very friendly letter to Leibniz, introducing himself as a supporter of Leibniz’s philosophy. Conti claimed that he was going to London as a supporter of Leibniz, who would defend his cause in London just as he had done in Paris. By 1715, Leibniz’s political perspectives were very grim, since his patroness, Sophie of Hanover, had died in May 1714. Leibniz was not going to become prime minister of England, because the new British king was Georg Ludwig of Hanover, King George I.
When Conti got to London, he began to act as a diabolical agent provocateur. Turning on his magnetism, he charmed Newton. Newton was impressed by his guest and began to let his hair down. Conti told Newton that he had been trained as a Cartesian. “I was myself, when young, a Cartesian,” said the sage wistfully, and then added that Cartesian philosophy was nothing but a “tissue of hypotheses,” and of course Newton would never tolerate hypotheses. Newton confessed that he had understood nothing of his first astronomy book, after which he tried a trigonometry book with equal failure. But he could understand Descartes very well. With the ground thus prepared, Conti was soon a regular dinner guest at Newton’s house. He seems to have dined with Newton on the average three evenings per week. Conti also had extensive contacts with Edmond Halley, with Newton’s anti-Trinitarian parish priest Samuel Clarke, and other self-styled scientists. Conti also became friendly with Princess Caroline, the Princess of Wales, who had been an ally of Leibniz. Conti became very popular at the British court, and by November 1715 he was inducted by Newton as a member of the Royal Society.
Conti understood that Newton, kook that he was, represented the ideal cult figure for a new obscurantist concoction of deductive- inductive pseudo mathematical formalism masquerading as science. Thanks to the Venetians, Italy had Galileo, and France had Descartes. Conti might have considered concocting a pseudo scientific ideology for the English based on Descartes, but that clearly would not do, since Venice desired to use England above all as a tool to tear down France with endless wars. Venice needed an English Galileo, and Conti provided the intrigue and the public relations needed to produce one, in a way not so different from Paolo Sarpi a century before.
THE LEIBNIZ-NEWTON CONTEST
Conti received a letter from Leibniz repeating that Newton had never mastered the calculus, and attacking Newton for his occult notion of gravitation, his insistence on the existence of atoms and the void, his inductive method. Whenever Conti got a letter from Leibniz, he would show it to Newton, to stoke the fires of Newton’s obsessive rage to destroy Leibniz. During this time, Newton’s friend Samuel Clarke began an exchange of letters with Leibniz about these and related issues. (Voltaire later remarked of Clarke that he would have made an ideal Archbishop of Canterbury if only he had been a Christian.) Leibniz wrote that natural religion itself was decaying in England, where many believe human souls to be material, and others view God as a corporeal being. Newton said that space is an organ, which God uses to perceive things. Newton and his followers also had a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time; otherwise, it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.” This gave rise to the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, in which we can also see the hand of Conti. By now, the chameleon Conti was a total partisan of Newton’s line of atoms and the void, the axioms of Newtonian absolute space. “If there were no void,” wrote Conti, “all bodies would be equally heavy and the comets could not pass through heavenly spaces…. M. Leibniz has written his speech to Princess [Caroline], and he presents the world not as it is, but as it could be.” (Badaloni, Antonio Conti, 63).
Newton tried to get the ambassadors of the London diplomatic corps to review his old manuscripts and letters, hoping they would endorse the finding of the Royal Society that Leibniz had plagiarized his calculus. Leibniz had pointed out that the Royal Society had stacked the evidence. Conti used this matter to turn George I more and more against Leibniz. Conti organized the Baron von Kilmansegge, the Hanoverian minister and husband of George I’s mistress, to take the position that the review of documents would not be enough; the only way to decide the Leibniz-Newton controversy was through a direct exchange of letters between the two. King George agreed with this. Conti encouraged Newton to make a full reply to Leibniz, so that both letters could be shown to the king. When he heard Newton’s version, the king indicated that Newton’s facts would be hard for Leibniz to answer.
Conti tried to convince Leibniz to accept the 1715 verdict of the Royal Society which had given credit for the calculus to Newton. In return, to sweeten this galling proposal, Conti generously conceded that Leibniz’s calculus was easier to use and more widely accepted. By now Leibniz was well aware that he was dealing with an enemy operative, but Leibniz died on Nov. 4, 1716, a few days before Conti arrived in Hanover to meet him. Newton received word of the death of his great antagonist through a letter from Conti.
CONTI’S DEPLOYMENT TO FRANCE
Thanks to Conti’s intervention as agent provocateur, Newton had received immense publicity and had become a kind of succes de scandale. The direct exchange mandated by George I suggested to some an equivalence of Leibniz and Newton. But now Conti’s most important work was just beginning. Leibniz was still held in high regard in all of continental Europe, and the power of France was still immense. Conti and the Venetians wished to destroy both. In the Leibniz-Newton contest, Conti had observed that while the English sided with Newton and the Germans with Leibniz, the French, Italians, Dutch, and other continentals wavered, but still had great sympathy for Leibniz. These powers would be the decisive swing factors in the epistemological war. In particular, the attitude which prevailed in France, the greatest European power, would be decisive. Conti now sought to deliver above all France, plus Italy, into the Newtonian camp.
Conti was in London between 1715 and 1718. His mission to France lasted from 1718 through 1726. Its result will be called the French Enlightenment, L’Age des Lumieres. The first components activated by Conti for the new Newtonian party in France were the school and followers of Malebranche, who died in 1715. The Malebranchistes first accepted Newton’s Opticks, and claimed to have duplicated Newton’s experiments, something no Frenchman had done until this time. Here Conti was mobilizing the Malebranche network he had assembled before going to London. Conti used his friendship with Fontenelle, the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, to secure his benevolent neutrality regarding Newton. Conti’s other friends included Mairan, Reaumur, Freret, and Desmolets.
During the late teens and ’20s in Paris, an important salon met at the Hotel de Rohan, the residence of one of the greatest families of the French nobility. This family was aligned with Venice; later, we will find the Cardinal-Prince de Rohan as the sponsor of the Venetian agent Count Cagliostro. The librarian at the Hotel de Rohan was a certain Abbe Oliva. Oliva presided over a Venetian-style conversazione attended by Conti, his Parisian friends, and numerous Italians. This was already a circle of freethinkers and libertines.
In retrospect, the best known of the participants was Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu. Montesquieu, before Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedia, was the first important figure of the French Enlightenment – more respectable than Voltaire and Rousseau – and the leading theoretician of political institutions. Conti met Montesquieu at the Hotel de Rohan, and at another salon, the Club de l’Entresol. Later, when Conti had returned to Venice, Montesquieu came to visit him there, staying a month. Montesquieu was an agent for Conti.
Montesquieu’s major work is The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. This is a work of decidedly Venetian flavor, with republic, monarchy, and despotism as the three forms of government, and a separation of powers doctrine. Montesquieu appears to have taken many of his ideas from Conti, who wrote a profile of France called “Historical and Political Discourse on the State of France between 1700 and 1730.” In his treatise, Montesquieu points out that France has an independent judiciary, the parlements, which became a main focus for Anglo-Venetian destabilization efforts going toward the French Revolution.
Montesquieu raises the theme of Anglophilia, praising Britain’s allegedly constitutional monarchy as the ideal form. With this, the pro-British bent of Conti’s Enlightenment philosophes is established. The ground is being prepared for Newton.
ANOTHER CONTI AGENT: VOLTAIRE
One of Conti’s other friends from the Hotel de Rohan was a Jesuit called Tournemine, who was also a high school teacher. One of his most incorrigible pupils had been a libertine jailbird named Francois-Marie Arouet, who was so stubborn and headstrong that his parents had always called him “le volontaire,” meaning self-willed. Gradually this was shortened to Voltaire.
French literary historians are instinctively not friendly to the idea that the most famous Frenchman was a Venetian agent working for Conti, but the proof is convincing. Voltaire knew both Conti personally and Conti’s works. Conti is referred to a number of times in Voltaire’s letters. In one letter, Voltaire admiringly shares an anecdote about Conti and Newton. Voltaire asks, should we try to find the proof of the existence of God in an algebraic formula on one of the most obscure points in dynamics? He cites Conti in a similar situation with Newton: “You’re about to get angry with me,” says Conti to Newton, “but I don’t care.” I agree with Conti, says Voltaire, that all geometry can give us are about forty useful theorems. Beyond that, it’s nothing more than a fascinating subject, provided you don’t let metaphysics creep in.
Voltaire also relates Conti’s version of the alleged Spanish conspiracy against Venice in 1618, which was supposedly masterminded by the Spanish ambassador to Venice, Count Bedmar. Conti’s collected works and one of his tragedies are in Voltaire’s library, preserved at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
The book which made Voltaire famous was his Philosophical Letters, sometimes called the English letters, because they are devoted to the exaltation of all things British, which Voltaire had observed during his three years in London. In the essay on Shakespeare, Voltaire writes that Shakespeare is considered the Corneille of England. This is a quote from Conti, taken from the head note to Conti’s tragedy Giulio Cesare, which had been published in Paris in 1726. Voltaire’s view of Shakespeare as sometimes inspired, but barbarous and “crazy” for not respecting French theatrical conventions, is close to Conti’s own practice. We can thus associate Conti with Voltaire’s first important breakthrough, and the point where Anglophilia becomes Anglomania in France.
But most important, Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters center on the praise of Newton. After chapters on Francis Bacon and John Locke, there are four chapters on Newton, the guts of the work. For Voltaire, Newton was the first discoverer of the calculus, the dismantler of the entire Cartesian system. His “sublime ideas” and discoveries have given him “the most universal reputation.” Voltaire also translated Newton directly, and published Elements of Newtonian Philosophy.
The Philosophical Letters were condemned and Voltaire had to hide in the libertine underground for a time. He began to work on another book, The Century of Louis XIV. The idea here was simple: to exalt Louis XIV as a means of attacking the current king, Louis XV, by comparison. This was an idea that we can also find in Conti’s manuscripts. Louis XV was, of course, a main target of the Anglo-Venetians.
In 1759, Voltaire published his short novel Candide, a distillation of Venetian cultural pessimism expressed as a raving attack on Leibniz, through the vicious caricature Dr. Pangloss. Toward the end of the story, Candide asks Pangloss: “Tell me, my dear Pangloss, when you were hanged, dissected, cruelly beaten, and forced to row in a galley, did you still think that everything was for the best in this world?” “I still hold my original opinions, replied Pangloss, because after all, I’m a philosopher, and it wouldn’t be proper for me to recant, since Leibniz cannot be wrong, and since pre-established harmony is the most beautiful thing in the world, along with the plenum and subtle matter.” When Candide visits Venice, he meets Senator Pococurante, whom he considers a great genius because everything bores him and nothing pleases him. Senator Pococurante is clearly a figure of Abbot Antonio Conti. Conti was, we must remember, the man whom Voltaire quoted admiringly in his letter cited above telling Newton that he didn’t care – non me ne curo, perhaps, in Italian. Among Conti’s masks was certainly that of worldly boredom.
Conti later translated one of Voltaire’s plays, Merope, into Italian.
CONTI AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Conti’s discussion of the supremacy of the sense of touch when it comes to sense certainty is echoed in the writing of the philosopher Condillac. Echoes of Conti have been found by some in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. And then there is Buffon, who published Newton’s book on fluxions in French. More research is likely to demonstrate that most of the ideas of the French Enlightenment come from the Venetian Conti. The creation of a pro- Newton, anti-Leibniz party of French Anglomaniacs was a decisive contribution to the defeat of France in the mid-century world war we call the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, which gave Britain world naval supremacy, and world domination. Conti’s work was also the basis for the later unleashing of the French Revolution. In the epistemological war, the French Newtonians were indispensable for the worldwide consolidation of the Newton myth. In Italy, there were Venetian writers like Voltaire’s friend Algarotti, the author of a book of Newtonian Philosophy for Ladies. Newton’s ideas were also spread by Abbot Guido Grandi, who labored to rehabilitate Galileo inside the Catholic Church. Another Italian intellectual in Conti’s orbit was Gimbattista Vico, later popularized by Benedetto Croce. The main point is that only with the help of Venice could the senile cultist kook Newton attain worldwide respect.
Conti was active until mid-century; he died in 1749. In Venice he became the central figure of a salon that was the worthy heir of Ridotto Morosini. This was the sinister coven that called itself the philosophical happy conversazione (“la conversazione filosofica e felice”) that gathered patrician families like the Emo, the Nani, the Querini, the Memmo, and the Giustinian. These were libertines, freethinkers, Satanists. We are moving toward the world portrayed in Schiller’s Geisterseher. After Conti’s death, the dominant figure was Andrea Memmo, one of the leaders of European Freemasonry.
An agent shared by Memmo with the Morosini family was one Giacomo Casanova, a homosexual who was backed up by a network of lesbians. Venetian oligarchs turned to homosexuality because of their obsession with keeping the family fortune intact by guaranteeing that there would only be one heir to inherit it; by this time more than two- thirds of male nobles, and an even higher percentage of female nobles, never married. Here we have the roots of Henry Kissinger’s modern Homintern. Casanova’s main task was to target the French King Louis XV through his sexual appetites. There is good reason to believe that Louis XV’s foreign minister De Bernis, who carried out the diplomatic revolution of 1756, was an agent of Casanova. One may speculate that Casanova’s networks had something to do with the approximately 25 assassination plots against Louis XV. Finally, Louis XV banned Casanova from France with a lettre de cachet.
Another agent of this group was Count Cagliostro, a charlatan and mountebank whose targets were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whom he destabilized through their own folly in the celebrated Queen’s Necklace Affair of 1785. Cagliostro was able to make Louis and especially Marie Antoinette personally hated, a necessary precondition for mass insurrection against them. Emperor Napoleon later said that this operation by Cagliostro had marked the opening phase of the French Revolution of 1789.
CONTI’S LEGACY OF EVIL
Another member of the Conti-Memmo conversazione was Giammaria Ortes, who had been taught Newton by Conti personally, as well as by Grandi. Ortes was another defrocked cleric operating as an abbot. Ortes is the author of a manual of Newtonian physics for young aristocrats, including a chapter on electricity which manages to avoid Benjamin Franklin, in the same way that Galileo avoided Kepler. Ortes carried out Conti’s program of applying Newtonian methods to the social sciences. This meant that everything had to be expressed in numbers. Ortes was like the constipated mathematician who worked his problem out with a pencil. He produced a calculus on the value of opinions, a calculus of the pleasures and pains of human life, a calculus of the truth of history. This is the model for Jeremy Bentham’s felicific or hedonistic calculus and other writings. Using these methods, Ortes posited an absolute upper limit for the human population of the Earth, which he set at 3 billion. This is the first appearance of carrying capacity. Ortes was adamant that there had never been and could never be an improvement in the living standard of the Earth’s human population. He argued that government intervention, as supported by the Cammeralist school of Colbert, Franklin, and others, could never do any good. Ortes provided all of the idea-content that is found in Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, the two Mills, and the rest of Lord Shelburne’s school of British philosophical radicalism in the time after 1775.
Conti has left a commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, which he interprets as Plato’s self- criticism for the mistake of having made ideas themselves the object of philosophical attention. In his Treatise on Ideas, Conti writes that the fundamental error of Plato is to attribute real existence to human ideas. All our ideas come from sense perceptions, says Conti.
In 1735 Conti was denounced to the Venetian Inquisition because of his reported religious ideas. Conti was accused of denying the existence of God. True to his factional pedigree, Conti also denied the immortality of the human soul. Conti reportedly said of the soul: “Since it is united with a material body and mixed up with matter, the soul perished with the body itself.” Conti got off with the help of his patrician aristocrat friends. He commented that God is something that we cannot know about, and jokingly confessed his ignorance. He even compared himself to Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. Conti described his own atheism as merely a version of the docta ignorantia [referring to Cusa’s book by the same name, On Learned Ignorance]. But this Senatore Pococurante still lives in every classroom where Newton is taught.
Surely it is time for an epistemological revolution to roll back the Venetian frauds of Galileo, Newton, and Bertrand Russell.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES
On the general thesis involving Contarini as the instigator of the reformation and counter- reformation, Sarpi and the Giovani as the organizers of the Enlightenment, and the post-Cambrai metastasis of the Venetian fondi to England and elsewhere, see Webster G. Tarpley, “The Venetian Conspiracy” in “Campaigner” XIV, 6 September 1981, pp. 22-46.
On Leonardo da Vinci and the origins of the telescope, see the work of Domenico Argentieri.
On Sarpi: The most essential works of Sarpi’s epistemology are the Pensieri and the Arte di Ben Pensare. They are available only in Italian as Fra Paolo Sarpi, “Scritti Filosofici e teologici” (Bari: Laterza, 1951). But this collection is not complete, and many pensieri and other material remain in manuscript in the libraries of Venice. Other works of Sarpi are assembled in his “Opere,” edited by Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi. There is some discussion of the pensieri in David Wooton, “Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). An overview of the Galileo-Sarpi relationship is found in Gaetano Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l’Europa” (Torino: Einaudi, 1979); Cozzi avoids most of the implications of the material he presents.
On Galileo: Pietro Redondi, “Galileo: Heretic” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) has material on the political background of Galileo’s relations with the papacy and the holy orders of the day. The Galileo-Kepler correspondence is in Galileo’s 20 volume “Opere,” edited by A. Favaro and I. Del Lungo (Florence, 1929-1939).
On Kepler: The standard biography is Max Caspar, “Kepler” (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959). Some of Kepler’s main works are now in English, including “The Secret of the Universe” translated by A.M. Duncan (New York: Abaris Books, 1981); and “New Astronomy” translated by William H. Donahue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
On Conti: A recent biography is Nicola Badaloni, “Antonio Conti: Un abate libero pensatore fra Newton e Voltaire (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1968). Selections from Conti’s many manuscript works which are found in libraries especially in and near Venice are in Nicola Badaloni (ed.), “Antonio Conti: Scritti filosofici” (Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972). For Conti as the teacher of Ortes, and on Ortes as a popularizer of Newton see Mauro di Lisa, “‘Chi mi sa dir s’io fingo?’: Newtonianesimo e scetticismo in Giammaria Ortes” in “Giornale Critico della filosofia italiana” LXVII (1988), pp. 221-233. For the Conti- Oliva- Montesquieu Paris salons, see Robert Shackleton, “Montesquieu: a critical biography.” Voltaire’s “Candide” and “Philosophical Letters” are available in various English language editions. For Voltaire’s references to Conti, see “Voltaire’s Correspondence,” edited in many volumes by Theodore Besterman (Geneva- Les Delices: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1964). Note that Voltaire also had extensive correspondence and relations with Algarotti. For Voltaire’s possession of Conti’s books, see the catalogue of Voltaire’s library now conserved in Leningrad published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1961, p. 276. Gustave Lanson is an example of French literary critics who stubbornly avoid the obvious facts of Conti’s piloting of Voltaire; see his edition of Voltaire’s “Lettres philosophiques” (Paris, 1917), vol. II p. 90.
On Newton: Lord Keynes’s revelations on Newton’s box are in his “Essays in Biography” (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 310-323. Louis Trenchard More, “Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York: Dover, 1962) includes a small sampling of material from Newton’s box. Richard S. Westfall, “Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton” (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987) dips somewhat deeper into the box and supplies the green lion quotes, but still tries to defend the hoax of Newton as a scientist. For the typical lying British view of the Newton-Leibniz controversy, see A. Rupert Hall, “Philosophers at War” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). See Leibniz’s letters for what really happened.
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