Sir David Brewster Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Dis-
coveries of Sir Isaac Newton, published in 1855, is a worthy suc-
cessor to Stukeley and contributes much to our understanding of
Newton, but again it is tarnished by the author's lack of objectivity.
Brewster, like others, ignored evidence that did not fit his image of
Newton; he decided to paint a one-sided view that merely reinforced
the image that Newton himself tried to establish for posterity, without
questioning the many contradictions in the scientist's long and com-
plex life.

There is no question of the greatness of Newton's work, nor of
his intellect. But, just as his most famous work, the Principia
Mathematica, is a highly sophisticated and complex description of
the mechanistic workings of the universe based upon simple, easily
understood truths, so too was his personality far more twisted and
convoluted than orthodox historians of science would have us believe.

Newton was above all a secretive man, a man coiled in upon
himself, detached from the world, and for long periods of his life he
was secluded from the everyday current of affairs. For much of his
working life he studied and experimented alone in his college rooms
and in his laboratory nearby. In many respects, he was nonconformist
from an early age, shunning the simple rural life of his family, living
in self-imposed isolation at university, refusing to take holy orders.
He subscribed to Arianism -- the doctrine of an heretical sect which
denied the principle of the Holy Trinity -- when public awareness of
such beliefs would have wrecked his career. And, most importantly
of all, he was an alchemist.

By the time biographers came to consider his life, Newton was
dead and the need to hide his religious leanings had gone. But what
stuck in the craw of those early biographers was a body of material
found in Newton's vast library and within his huge collection of
papers and notebooks that made it very clear that the most respected
scientist in history, the model for the scientific method, had spent
more of his life intensely involved with alchemy than he had delving
into the clear blue waters of pure science. It also confirmed what a
few of Newton's close friends had known during his lifetime: that
he had expended a vast amount of his time studying the chronology
of the Bible, examining prophecy, investigating natural magic, and,
most of all, attempting to unravel the hermetic secrets -- the prisca
sapientia.

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