Note 48 — XVII THINKING AND KNOWING

“There can be no doubt that Newton was an alchemist, and that he often labored night and day at alchemical experiments. But in trying to discover the secret by which gross metals might be rendered noble his lofty powers of deductive investigation were wholly useless. Deprived of all guiding clues, his experiments were like those of all the alchemists, purely haphazard and tentative. While his hypothetical and deductive investigations have given us a true system of the universe, and opened the way for almost all the great branches of natural philosophy, the whole results of his tentative experiments are comprehended in a few happy guesses, given in his celebrated ‘Queries.’”—Jevons’s “Principles of Science,” pages 505, 506.