Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer Michael White. Fourth Estate, London, 1997. Price £18.99.

Of all the books released on this truly great man, one aspect of him which has continued to remain in obscurity is his almost obsessive passion for the age-old quest of alchemy, which is precisely the focus of Michael White's highly commendable exploration into this complicated and apparently contradictory figure.
    It is perhaps no accident that the cultural milieu which fostered Newton also spawned the emergence of modern Freemasonry. It is not known whether Newton himself was a mason, but he did frequent the Gentlemen's Club of Spalding which included a number of members, and he would undoubtedly have known of the Craft's interest in King Solomon's Temple, an interest he shared. He saw Solomon as the most profound ancient, believing that he had designed his temple with a unique insight into God's laws, a kind of paradigm for the universe: a microcosmic model. According to White, it was his obsessive interest in the configuration and dimensions of the temple which most surprisingly led to his theory of universal gravitation. Indeed, the legendary story of Newton first conceiving the notion of gravity by observing a falling apple in his garden, appears to be merely that: a legend, a story propagated by his first biographer, the antiquarian and Freemason, the Rev. William Stukeley (see the article on the Royston Cave in this issue).
    Upon Newton's death, such was the incomprehension regarding his predeliction for esoterica that some of his contemporaries sought to hide many of his writings and extensive library on the subject. Yet in more recent times, the psychologist Carl Jung was not alone in believing that the traditional physical experimenta of the alchemists provided the stimulus requisite to producing a meditation which led to internal change in the practitioner himself. The transmutation was best understood as a metaphor for spiritual illumination, and the quest for the philosopher's stone was quintessentially the journey to discover the true self, a perfected stone, once the rough materials of the non essential personality had been chiseled (or burnt) away.
    Matthew Scanlan.