Newton's Alchemy Apologists Unmasked

The discovery by Keynes that Isaac Newton was a dedicated kook in extremis is always rather blithely dismissed by his adulators with a wink by the pat formula that they were all doing magic nonsense back then. Hmm...really? Was Newton's adversary Leibniz a benighted necromancer as well? Hardly. In fact, read his point by point refutation of John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" and you will find just the very opposite.

On the other hand, if you have the stomach to read the lengthy tome The Anatomy Of Melancholy by Robert Burton, you will laugh at all sorts of malarkey about magic stone cures, Rosicrucianism and witchery ad nauseum. See Keats Eve of St Agnes. Rather like the new age kookery from the hippies decades ago. Did you know that Edmund Spencer's Fairie Queene was inspired by Kabalistic magic, and that Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice scene of the choosing of the caskets is right out of the Cabalistic legerdemain. The marriage counselor of Henry VIII was the Venetian Cabalistic monk Giorgi, aka Zorzi (he read auras.)

Leibniz attacked Newton's magical belief that the universe was set into motion by a fatherly clock maker who must then stand back and impotently watch the entropic magical action at a distance mayhem ensue. Descartes' momentum he proved is not  equivalent to force. Descartes and later Grassman's vision of a manifold of empty space where we can only describe an algebra that locates mere dead points. The very belief today that according to the much worshiped Second Law of Thermodynamics humanity is doomed to run out of energy and that technology is evil is the epitome of cultish kookery today centered where? In the "British" monarchy's Worldwide Fund for Nature (which really isn't English at all, Leibniz in fact would have been prime minister, in effect, for the Electress of Hanover, Sophie Charlotte upon her succession, had she lived) --that's where! So now Greenpeace and green this and green that and earth this and earth that are called science. Gaia worship is all it is. The same crowd that subverted Vernadsky's rigorous evolutionary concept of Noosphere Teilhard de Chardin. The same lunacy of the futurologists singularity Omega point garbage that wag Newt Gingrich's mouth. And who pray tell was the biggest addicted opium eater (laudanum back then) of them all old boy? Queen Victoria that's who.