1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

330 11. The Age-Long Recovery
resurfacing, there were those who postulated a severe case of split personality;
more recently we have started seeing more irreverent accounts
as well. 137
Newton was sharply aware of the importance of knowledge inherited
from Antiquity, but his use of nonscientific sources and his ideological
bent did not allow him to perceive the true origin of the relevant knowledge,
namely Hellenistic science. In his view, the profundity of thought of
the “Ancients” (which struck him inordinately) arose from an early Truth
preserved in the esoteric tradition of priesthoods and religious sects. Here
is how the origins of heliocentrism are presented in the System of the world:
It was the opinion of not a few, in the earliest age of philosophy, . . .
that under the fixed stars the planets were carried about the sun; that
the earth, as one of the planets, described an annual course about
the sun, while by a diurnal motion it was in the meantime revolved
about its own axis. . . . This was the philosophy taught of old by
Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, Plato . . . and of that wise king of the
Romans, Numa Pompilius, who, as a symbol of the figure of the world
with the sun in the centre, erected a round temple in honor of Vesta,
and ordained perpetual fire to be kept in the middle of it.
The Egyptians were early observers of the heavens; and from them,
probably, this philosophy was spread abroad among other nations;
for from them it was, and the nations about them, that the Greeks,
a people more addicted to the study of philology than of Nature,
derived their first, as well as soundest, notions of philosophy; and
in the Vestal ceremonies we may yet trace the ancient spirit of the
Egyptians; for it was their way to deliver their mysteries, that is, their
philosophy of things above the common way of thinking, under the page 406
veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols. 138
The superiority of the Egyptians over the Greeks, and of sacred rites and
mysteries over rational research, is a topos of Hermetic literature, a genre
that dates from late Hellenistic times (when native Egyptians regained
137 For example, [White]. Newton’s first exegetic work on the Apocalypse of St. John, written in
the 1670s, was first published in 1994, as [Newton/Mamiani]. Its very existence was little known
and indeed had been concealed by Samuel Horsley, the first editor of Newton’s “complete” works
(1779). The Observations on the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, written much later in
Newton’s life, were published in 1733 and enjoyed several reprintings, including the recent [Newton/Barnett];
they probably contributed to the false belief that Newton’s writings on religion were
the product of his declining years. There is in fact methodological continuity between Newton’s
religious works and the Principia; in this regard the introduction to [Newton/Mamiani] is very
worth reading.
138 Newton, De mundi systemate liber, 1, anonymous/Cajori translation.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20