Attempting to transmute a metal in the material was a ritual act coinciding with the "Great Work". That tandem practice is built into the philosophy of performing the act. That is, to the "mundane" it was just chemical experimentation, but to the initiates of the magical (or other enlightenment) orders was a dual act reflecting one of their core intuitions (paraphrased): "as above, so below" or what is external to the mind is reflective of what is internal. In other words, irreducible to one or the other (mental or physical act).https://news.ycombinator.com/news

I'm teasing at proposing, after Keynes, that maybe his alchemy worked, and he just didn't understand how.

But there's no salvaging the storybook version of Newton here. Newton was many things, but the innocent, curious monkey sitting under an apple tree he was not. (well, he was—at least insofar as we all are, anyway)