*"*How Newton the alchemist put Britain on the Gold Standard For J
M Keynes, of the scientific sons of CambridgeUniversity, Newton outshone as
his intellectual hero both Bacon before and Darwin after. "We suffer from
the habit of interpreting the great men of the past by reference to what
came after instead of what and what they were imbibing in their youth.
Tradition treats Newton as a pure eighteenth century figure of almost
Voltairean rationalism. In fact, the whole of his thought and temperament
was rooted in what preceded him. He was, as I put it the last of the
magicians, and not the first of the rationalists." Keynes wrote his*
Memoir*in 1942 on the tercentenary of Newton's birth. Thus Newton grew
up under
Oliver Cromwell, who saw everything as Divine Revelation; often to be
divined in the Book of Revelations itself. So, for example, Newton, in
secret was a heretical Anti-Trinitarian. He denied the divinity of Christ
not out of enlightened freethinking but because there was no Biblical
provenance for the Trinity – indeed for a Pope.
"Why do I call him a magician,?" Keynes asks. "Because he looked
on the whole universe and all that was in it *as a riddle,* as a secret that
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." Keynes was the first to
re-unite Newton's papers – and 90% of them - heretically to modern
Positivist scientists - were on alchemy or theological speculation.
Calculus, Newton kept secret because he used it in alchemy; he used the term
"gravity" to avoid the "occult" term "attraction" since both alchemy and
early Biblical theology had a part in "gravity's" discovery.
Newton's different studies, all valid and relevant, constituted for him a
unified plan for obtaining Truth obtained from the partial truths from
textual prophesy, ancient theology and philosophy, creative mathematics or
experiments with prisms, pendulums, vegetating minerals, light or
electricity. The result of 25 years of intensive thought, Newton's *Principia
Mathematica, *waspublished in 1687 at that scientific, philosophical,
political and economic watershed that was the 1688-9 Glorious Revolution.
This created under the direction of Newton's friend, John Locke that
Parliamentary Limited Monarchy, mirroring a Company on the Stock
Exchange, along with an Act of [Religious] Toleration and the formation of
modern capitalism with the Bank of England, The Stock Exchange and Lloyds
Insurance. After Newton even the starry heavens of the Universe were not
(like the Sun King's France), under blind Divine arbitrariness, but under
the rule of God's published and empirical Law of Motion.
Overwork, mercury poisoning and the end, in 1693, of a partnership
of love and alchemy with the young Swiss mathematician Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier led to a complete nervous breakdown. Another intimate friend
Charles Montagu, the Earl of Halifax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in
1695 offered Newton the Wardenship, and then later the Mastership, of the
Mint. This was supposed to be a sinecure, but Newton applied the same all
consuming determination to economics as he did to cosmology.
Now the retired alchemist set about the re-coinage of the English
currency. Without the re-coinage in 1696 the foundation of the Bank of
England and all subsequent English Capitalism and Imperialism would have
been impossible. Clipped coins or those corrupted with alloys were the
equivalent of sub-prime derivatives; their face value was false. Credit must
be credible. "*I promise to pay the bearer the sum of £5"* a Bank of England
note is still "inscribed with trust". The alchemy of a Sterling Silver
Standard in the "modern scientific" world is that it allows credit to grow,
National Debts to be funded, Bonds to be potential liquidity and Shares to
be traded and *Hedge Funders* [stock jobbers] to leverage, all to many
multiples of the actual, but of equal trusted value, Sterling convertible
coinage. In 1717, by Newton making a golden Guinea = 21 silver shillings,
gold was added to liquidity.
Newton not only now studied economics with the assiduity with which he
pursued the *prisca sapientia, *he saved the re-coinage from bankrupting the
economy by as a technologist inventing new minting presses and as a time and
motion expert creating a new production line. The wizard's love of power and
status meant that he won back, through researching old documents, the
original plenary powers of his office. As the old coins were called in from
1 Jan 1696, all depended on the speed of returning new coin to the market.
By April only £330,000 had been reclaimed but through Newton's management,
new local Mints and new technology £4,706,003 had been recalled by 24 June
1696 and was being speedily replaced. The silver content of the old currency
proved to be only 54% of the face value and Newton estimated 20% was
counterfeit. The Treasury was unconcerned, but Newton was outraged at this
affront to the "truth" of his coinage.
The fastidious and abstemious Newton now became an investigating magistrate
working undercover in underworld pubs and throughout the country in one
period claiming £120 spent "in coach hire and at taverns, prisons and other
places in the prosecution of clippers and coiners [counterfeiters]". Between
June 1698- Dec 1699 he interrogated 200 witnesses, suspects and informers;
the latter "scandalously mercenary". 10 were found guilty and executed.
His greatest challenge was William Chaloner, a rich confidence trickster
with friends in high places who accused the Mint of providing tools to
counterfeiters and who petitioned Parliament for he himself to inspect
Newton's Mint and then for himself to produce a coinage less open to
forgery. Newton was outraged and began undercover investigations and found
that Chaloner himself was a forger. Nothing daunted by Chaloner using
influence to get off in his first trial, Newton doggedly persevered and on
23 March 1699 Chaloner suffered the forger's death for High Treason of being
hung, drawn [disembowelled alive] and quartered [dismembered]; the very
penalty Newton himself would have suffered had he succeeded in his
experiments in making gold via the Philosopher's Stone*." *
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/CMSTP/tmplrubriche/giornalisti/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=145&ID_articolo=97&ID_sezione=308&sezione
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