Newton privately pictured the earth as a great living animal breathing.

Evidence

In an unpublished manuscript of about 1674, “Of Nature’s Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegetation,” possibly inspired by the interest in vegetative principles among the Cambridge Platonists, he inquired about the action of a latent vegetative spirit produced in fermentation. “No spirit,” he wrote, “searches bodies so subtly, piercingly, and quickly as does the vegetable spirit.” “The earth resembles a great animal or rather inanimate vegetable,” which “draws in etheral breath for its daily refreshment and vital ferment and transpires again with gross exhalations. And according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its times of beginning, youth, old age, and perishing.” The vegetative spirit produced in fermentation is “nature’s universal agent, her secret fire, the only ferment and principle of all vegetation.” — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1051

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch9’s premodern earth-breathing/earthquakes as living-body imagery (Stoics, breaking wind) surviving even in Newton. — connects to: Stoics held the whole earth organism alive and breathing — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 136