In response to my request, some years ago, Professor Karin Figala prepared an elementary account of the results of her investigation of Newton's alchemical papers and related documents. This was communicated to me privately in March 1984. In the following paragraphs Professor Figala's summary is printed, with her permission. For her technical paper on this material, see ‘Die exakte Alchemie von Isaac Newton’ in Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft Basel 94, 1984, pp. 157–228.

The search for a combination of the exact sciences with magical thought was a central motive of the seventeenth-century attitude of mind: Newton was no exception to this rule. His personal attitude towards the problem is best illustrated by his (al)chemical research, for he seems to have seen in traditional alchemy – which he considered to be of divine origin – a possible synthesis of seemingly divergent lines of thought. He was convinced that God had arranged everything in Heaven and on Earth according to number and measure, thus sharing the firm belief of the ancient Pythagoreans. Harmonic proportion seems to be a key concept in Newton's thought, as mirrored in his theory of the material world. In fact, his theory of the composition of matter – laid down in principle in Opticks – centres on the material world; accordingly, contemporary alchemy immediately presented itself to his mind. It is in Newton's ‘rational alchemy’ that we can get hold of at least a small part of his attempt to reconcile magic and science.

In Newton's theory of the composition of matter, seemingly impenetrable particles are built up from cubic elementary cells, some of which hold matter, some of which do not.

The ‘will’ no longer plays a role in psychiatry and psychology. A hundred years ago, however, it was an important descriptive and explanatory concept, naming the human ‘power, potency or faculty’ to initiate action. At the end of the nineteenth century, it came under attack: ‘the domain of the voluntary, reified under the name of will in popular language was adopted by the primitive psychology of faculties’, (my italics) Experimentalism, psychoanalysis and behaviourism accelerated its fall, and by the end of the First World War, the will was no longer a fashionable concept. This created a conceptual vacuum in the ‘domain of the voluntary’ which has since been unsatisfactorily filled by notions such as Instinct’, ‘drive’, ‘motivation’, ‘decision-making’, and ‘frontal lobe executive’. The decline of the will also led to neglecting the study of aboulia, impulse, agoraphobia, and obsession as ‘pathological disorders of the will’. This chapter deals with the history of these disorders.

Will before the nineteenth century

The meaning of will was constructed in Classical times as a semantic blend of impulse, instinct, tendency, desire, objective and inclination. The Greeks, however, did not have a separate notion of the will and considered human action as being closely integrated with the intellect and the emotions: thus, Plato believed that desires or appetites (orexis) were related to sensations, whilst the will (boulesis) was linked to reasons and thoughts: ‘of our unnecessary pleasures and appetites there are some lawless ones, I think, which probably are to be found in us all, but which, when controlled by the laws and the better desires in alliance with reason, can in some men be altogether got rid of’.

There are excellent accounts of the history of hallucination and illusion but few in the English language. Hallucination and illusion name reports of experiences ascribed to perception: illusion is defined as a perceptual distortion of a stimulus, and hallucination as a perceptual declaration, of varied degree of conviction, in the absence of a relevant external stimulus. The theoretical basis for this distinction was set during the nineteenth century, although it had already been noticed by earlier writers.

Before the nineteenth century

Experiences redolent of hallucinations and illusions are part of the common baggage of humanity. Variously named, these experiences were in earlier times culturally integrated and semantically pregnant, i.e. their content was believed to carry a message for the individual or the world. That this feature of hallucinations has been mostly lost is a consequence of their ‘medicalization’ during the eighteenth century. During this period, hallucinations were considered as independent ‘diseases’; indeed, the view that they were ‘symptoms’, i.e. fragments of behaviour common to various diseases is a nineteenth century invention. The absence of an entry for hallucination in the French Encyclopaedia suggests that, up to the 1750s, it had not yet reached the status of other ‘psychiatric’ terms. Hunter and McAlpine have none the less shown that since the sixteenth century, hallucinatory behaviours were frequently mentioned; after 1700, Hartley and Battie added a further dimension by explaining these phenomena in terms of vibratory neurophy siology.

In 1770, the French Dufour suggested that ‘fallacies of the senses’ might cause delusions: ‘The false impression of the external senses, then, must necessarily create disorder and confusion in a person's conduct; because it happens most frequently, that they determine his actions.

Whilst stupor is the paradigm case for the motility disorders, parkinsonism represents the best example of symptomatology of the basal ganglia. This section explores its history both in its relationship to Parkinson's disease (PD) and to other clinical situations. The view that PD is but a collection of disorders variously sharing features such as tremor, rigidity, akinesia, and dysautonomy is becoming fashionable. Since the last century, this syndrome or ‘construct’ has been called parkinsonism and is now known to result from damage to pigmented cells in the substantia nigra and sympathetic ganglia. When the cause is unknown the syndrome is called Idiopathic' or Parkinson's disease proper; however, there is no evidence that this group - defined by exclusion - is homogeneous. It could be said that PD is a prototypical construct kept alive by alternatively defining it on the basis of clinical presentation or neuropathological marker (Lewy bodies). Unfortunately, the two definitions do not match: some with the symptoms do not have Lewy bodies, many with the latter do not have the disease.

This makes PD into an interesting historical subject as it offers the possibility of separately studying the history of terms (Parkinson's disease, paralysis agitans, etc), behaviours (tremor, akinesia, rigidity), and concepts and hypotheses. It also offers an opportunity to understand the way in which during the nineteenth century diseases were taken over by medical specialisms. This is the case with PD which, in spite of its clear psychiatric component, has been firmly kept within neurology. Indeed, to maintain the status quo, such component was for a long time either denied or played down.

Words and concepts related to aspects of behaviour now addressed as ‘personality’ (or disorders of) have been known for millenia. The historian must identify the moment when such descriptions appeared and the scientific and social forces that made them possible. Subordinate questions concern the conceptual pedigree of ‘personality trait’ as it is important to know whether it is different from that of ‘symptom’. Likewise, it is important to understand why ‘type’ and ‘trait’ have taken turns as the units of clinical analysis for personality disorder. Other questions might also be answered from the historical perspective: What is the relationship between ‘trait’ and ‘dimension’? Has the old notion of ‘moral insanity’ anything to do with the more recent one of ‘psychopathic behaviour’? Is the latter best conceived as a disorder of personality or as a form of insanity? Should the ‘neuroses’ be considered as periodic forms of personality disorder? What is the relationship between psychoses and disorder of personality? When did the concept of psychopathic personality become contaminated by ‘moral’ nuances? Are terms currently favoured any better than older ones such as moral insanity, impulsion, impulsive insanity, lucid insanity, volitional insanity, psychopathy, monomania, non-delusional insanity, or reasoning insanity? This chapter will focus on the nineteenth century and after. Historical scholarship on this period is beginning to accumulate.

The nineteenth century intellectual background

As repeatedly mentioned in this book, there were two psychological theories during the nineteenth century. Faculty psychology (the oldest) conceived the mind as a set of powers, faculties or functions; the most popular being a tripartite division into intellectual (cognitive), emotional (orectic), and volitional (or conative).

Swift was in England from November 1707 to May 1709 and from September 1710 to the middle of 1713, on Irish Church business. His first known reference to Catherine Barton is in his terse accounts, where he notes a loss of two shillings at ombre, at ‘Barton's’ on 4 December 1708. Twelve days later he was there again, suffering very bad ‘fitts’ of his habitual giddiness; he was forced to take a chair home, instead of walking as usual, and next day rewarded Mrs Barton's servants with the large present of 7s.6d in gratitude for their attentions. In April, July and August 1709 he recorded letters from Catherine, and on 26 May 1709 one written to her.

During his second and longer visit to England Swift noted in his journal for ‘Stella’ (Esther Johnson) that he dined with Mrs Barton three times in thirty-three months (28.ix.1710; 30.xi.1710; 7.iii.l711); he records visits to her on nine further occasions (19.xii.1710; 23.i.l711; 2.iv.l711; 10.iv.1711; 6.vii.l711; 18.vii.1711; 14.X.1711; 25.x.1711; 20.xii.1711). It is notable that by his own record Swift saw nothing of Mrs Barton during the whole of 1712, nor during the six months of 1713 that he spent in London.

During his first visit to London Swift associated with the Whigs and became friendly with Halifax, among others. He never in any way connected Halifax with Mrs Barton, though he continued to meet both during his second visit to London, when he supported the Tory interest (and therefore disputed with Mrs Barton, who like her uncle was a Whig).

Early nineteenth century views on suicide or self-harm were but a continuation of concepts created in previous centuries. The Enlightenment debate on suicide reflected a clash between religious views and the new liberalism, and this, to a certain extent, repeated itself after the 1800s. A good illustration is the work of Madame de Staël who, after writing an apology of suicide in 1796, published a rejoinder in 1812. This much neglected tract is entitled Reflexions sur le Suicide: In my work on the Influence of Passions I defended the act of Suicide, but I repent now of having penned those thoughtless words. I was then a proud and vivacious young woman: but what is the use of living but having the hope of improving oneself? Another representative of the liberal view was Cesare Beccaria who in his Dei delitti e delle pene wrote: ‘Suicide is a crime that cannot be punished for when punishment is meted out it either falls upon the innocent or upon a corpse. In the latter case it will have no effect upon the living, in the former it is tyrannical and unfair as political rights dictate that punishment must be personal.’

After the 1820s, the moral debate became ‘medicalized’, i.e. it was shaped by changes in the notion of mental disease and in psychological theory. As Lanteri-Laura and del Pistoia have observed: ‘at the end of the eighteenth century [suicide] ceased to be condemned on the basis of religiously inspired tradition: the secularisation of the law no longer made it permissible to punish it as a revolt against God.

For most of the nineteenth century, alienists had a preferential interest in the intellectual functions and their disorders; consequently, the semiology of ‘affectivity’ remained underdeveloped and contributed little to the emerging definitions of mental disease. This attitude was a legacy from Classical times when ‘passions’ were considered as the dark and lesser aspect of man. During the late eighteenth century there was a period when it seemed as if the passions might play an important role in the definition of man but this soon passed. Nineteenth century alienists were also limited in their capacity to deal with affective constructs by associationism and classical psychology. Such views markedly contrast with the extolling of emotions that characterized the Romantic movement.

This historical preference for the rational aspect of man is not, however, the only reason for the underdeveloped state of the semiology of affectivity. ‘Feelings’, ‘emotions’, ‘moods’, ‘affects’, and ‘passions’ are states whose experiential and behavioural components elude definition; to this day, for example, there is no agreement as to what should count as a valid report for an emotion. Secular efforts to capture these states in words only succeeded in creating a terminological palimpsest. During the second half of the century, however, there was a growing interest in affectivity as illustrated by the work of Brentano, the hypnotists, and later on by that of Janet and Freud.

A general preference for an intellectualistic account of mental disorder has not yet abandoned Western psychiatry. For example, depression, one of the few conditions considered as a ‘primary’ disorder of affect by nineteenth century alienists, is currently undergoing subtle revision.

In his translation of Hermann Boerhaave's Elements of Chemistry (1741) Peter Shaw wrote: ‘It is by means of chemistry, that Sir Isaac Newton has made a great part of his surprizing discoveries in natural philosophy,’ an opinion which becomes more understandable, if no less extravagant, when related to Shaw's wide claim that ‘chemistry, in its extent, is scarce less than the whole of natural philosophy.’ Such a high view of chemistry would not have been expressed a century earlier, indeed the rise of chemistry as a department of natural philsophy had taken place in Newton's lifetime. In this rise the writings of Robert Boyle had played a principal part, exercising (as we have seen) considerable influence over Newton himself. Many considerations lead me to believe that Newton's chemical atomism was Boyle's corpuscular chemistry revised, made more precise and rendered more complete, but also more deeply speculative. However, as Shaw correctly states, the Queries in Newton's Opticks had done much to enhance chemistry's reputation as a branch of theoretical science, the science of matter.

When Newton's chemical interests first took shape, Opticks and its Queries were still half a century in the future. It would be rash indeed to extrapolate the sophisticated atomist theory of chemical reaction found in them back into Newton's initial experiments of the late 1660s. No positive statements can be made about their date, nor about what book or which individual may have inspired Newton to attempt this kind of investigation.

Early Childhood

The Newton family belonged to the yeoman class descended from the most modest of the free landholders of manorial England. Socially beneath the esquires and knights, some members of this class had prospered greatly after the fourteenth-century decline of feudalism. Later the dissolution of the monasteries, sheep-farming and inflation had given some yeoman families, like the Newtons, means to enter the gentry class. As small landowners they lived in solid houses of brick or stone, sometimes adjacent to the barns and farmyard, like Newton's birthplace at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. Yeomen, who could not prosper by idleness, constituted a great reservoir of ambition and talent, supplying Church, universities and the law, as well as commerce and industry. They wrote plays for the stage and music for the nobility; they staffed the empire. The father whom Isaac Newton never knew, also Isaac, could not sign his name but his mother and half-sisters were literate after the phonetic style also practised by the greatest ladies. When the posthumous child was three years old his mother, Hannah, remarried Barnabas Smith, rector of nearby North Witham. Smith owned a small library of theological books, works of the Fathers and so on, which passed to his stepson. Thus Isaac was born into the lower limit of landed property and learning alike. When he was old and famous he took pains to satisfy the College of Heralds of his common descent with an established armigerous gentleman, Sir John Newton, who was glad to bring so famous a man among his own kin. Sir Isaac Newton for his part responded to many begging letters from his poor relations.

The terms obsession and compulsion name interloping and iterative thoughts and actions of a type and severity that may fracture behaviour. The condition is accompanied by feelings of distress, and declarations of resistance. Insight is assumed to be present but it may be belied by bizarre checking behaviour. Since last century, major works of scholarship on this condition have appeared. But obsession-like behaviours can be found mentioned in the literature of the ages, often under social or religious labels; and the question of whether such phenomena are neurobiologically equivalent to what is now called obsessive-compulsive disorder is tantalising. The medical concepts built into this diagnosis were tooled in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter deals with the historical process whereby such concepts and behaviours were brought together and transformed into a disease.

Obsession before 1800

In the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton reported an individual ‘who dared not go over a bridge, come near a pool, rock, steep hill, lie in a chamber where cross beams were, for fear he be tempted to hang, drown or precipitate himself. In a silent auditorium as at a sermon, he [was] afraid he shall speak aloud at unawares, something indecent, unfit to be said …’ Bishop Moore of Norwich referred to subjects overwhelmed by ‘naughty and sometimes blasphemous thoughts’ which ‘start in their minds while they are exercised in the Worship of God’.

The nineteenth century concept of ‘disorder of motility’ is one of the most difficult to grasp from the perspective of today. This tells much about the role of ideology and metaphor in descriptive psychopathology. For what might have in common clinical states as diverse as stupor, akinesia, catalepsy, psychomotor retardation, agitation, impulsions, bradyphrenia, parkinsonism, dyskinesias akathisia, grimacing, mannerisms, posturing, stereotypies, soft neurological signs, tremors and tics except, perhaps, the fact that they all refer in a general way to human movement? Confronted with such a list, the neurologist of today might respond as he would to a medieval bestiary, i.e. with amused disbelief. Of the old disorders of motility he will say that they are either involuntary movements of basal ganglia origin or psychogenic disorders, i.e. Voluntary' movements pretending to be otherwise.

Unfortunately, things are not as simple as this. For what is the status of catatonia or depressive stupor? Are they basal ganglia phenomena? Are they just ‘psychogenic’ states under the patient's control? Is it that he cannot move or that he does not want to? Should the complaint that he cannot move ever be taken seriously? On the other hand, is the ‘cannot’ of stupor analogous to the ‘cannot’ of hysterical paralysis? Where are the empirical answers to these questions? Should we accept Ajuriaguerra's ‘psychomotor syndromes’, or Hunter's ‘brain disease’ view, or Marsden et al.'s ‘areas of common interest’, or the ‘conflict of paradigms’ view? One approach to these complex issues is historical analysis, i.e. the going back in time to a period when dichotomies such as voluntary-involuntary, cortical-sub-cortical, and organic-psychogenic had not yet been invented.

With the freedom granted to all Lucasian professors to decline holy orders, Newton knew that so long as he retained that office he was assured of the tenure of his fellowship at Trinity College till death or resignation – in fact, he would hold it for another twenty-six years. He did not resign his Cambridge posts until December 1701, still not a Senior in his college though non-resident since 1696. Further, to the best of our knowledge, Newton had carried out no teaching since the Revolution.

His appearances in the public life of his college and university are poorly documented. In March 1673 he joined his relative Humphrey Babington and others, Masters of Arts, in signing a protest against the heads of houses exercising their customary but doubtful powers of nominating two candidates for the post of Public Orator, for the Senate's election. The protest failed. At an unknown date Newton attempted to secure from the commissioners of taxes for Cambridge an exemption from a property tax, on the grounds that the revenue from the Lucasian professorial estate did not belong to his college. (Later, from 1688 to 1695, Newton himself was to be one of these commissioners, a mark of his eminence in the university; the vicechancellor was one of the body ex officio.) In 1676 Newton gave £40 – then a fairly comfortable annual salary – towards the projected new library building proposed by Barrow at Trinity, since famous as the Wren Library closing the rear court of the college. This gift was followed by a loan of £100 made about the end of 1679; Newton also presented a number of books to the library.