Hermetic Newton
Aegypt continues to resonate, months after I read it, with various new things I encounter. Looking for info on Newton, for a story I'm editing, I came across an article titled "Prisca Sapientia" that talks about intriguing differences between Renaissance ideas about Greek and Roman scientific achievements and modern ideas:
It's ironic that most of the men who participated in the "scientific revolution", whose contributions seem (to us) so original and innovative, were themselves convinced that they were merely re-discovering the vast body of pristine knowledge (prisca sapientia) that had been possessed by the ancients, but somehow lost and forgotten during the centuries that came to be called the "dark ages" of western civilization. . . .
This attitude toward the past is, in some ways, the exact opposite of our usual view today, which is of a totally ordered sequence of eras progressing from less knowledge in the past to more knowledge in the future. It's hard for us to imagine, today, the intellectual climate among people who believed (knew) they were scientifically and mathematically inferior to their ancestors in the distant past.
(Which reminds me that someone told me recently that Newton's line about standing on the shoulders of giants was actually a not-so-subtle dig at one of his archrivals, who was a short man.)
The tag line from Aegypt comes to mind: "There is another history of the world. . . ." But wait, there's an even more direct connection: "Newton was clearly influenced by the hermetic tradition, which attributed all kinds of wisdom and secret knowledge to 'the ancients', not just mathematical." And then this, from Descartes: "I could not but suspect [the ancients] were acquainted with a mathematics very different from that which is commonly cultivated in our day." (That's out of context, though; Descartes (says the article) was really saying that the ancients' mathematics was inferior to what latter-day Europeans were coming up with. But still, I'm intrigued by the notion of a different mathematics practiced by ancient mathematicians and philosophers. I begin to see the appeal of the Hermetic tradition.)
