Newton was not the first of the age of reason, the great
rationalist scientist as conventional history likes to protray. He
was the "last of the magicians".
He belonged and was a product of the pre-newtonian age.
For the oligarchy, Newton and Galileo are the only two contenders
for the honor of being the most influential thinker of their
faction since Aristotle himself.
The British oligarchy praises Newton as the founder of modern
science. But, at the same time, they have been unable to keep
secret the fact that Newton was a raving irrationalist, a
cultist kook.
Among the oligarchs, it was the British economist Lord John
Maynard Keynes and a fellow Cambridge graduate who began to open
the black box of Newton's real character.
Was Newton the first and greatest of the modern scientists,
the practitioner of cold and untinctured reason?
No, said Keynes, Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason.
He was the last of the magicians, the last of the
Babylonians and Sumerians, the last wonderful child to whom the
Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
Keynes based his view on the contents of a box. What was in the
box? The box contained papers which Newton had packed up when he
left Cambridge for London in 1696, ending his Cambridge career and
beginning his new life in London as member and president of the
British Royal Society, director of the mint, resident magus of the
new British Empire.
Inside the box were manuscripts and papers totalling some 1.2
million words. After Newton's death, Bishop Horsley was
asked to inspect the box, with a view to publication, but when he
saw the contents, he recoiled in horror and slammed the lid. A
century passed. Newton's nineteenth-century biographer, Sir David
Brewster, looked into the box. He decided to save Newton's
reputation by printing a few selections, but he falsified the rest
with straight fibbing, as Keynes says. The box became
known as the Portsmouth Papers. A few mathematical papers were
given to Cambridge in 1888.
In 1936, the current owner, Lord Lymington, needed money, so he had
the rest auctioned off. Keynes bought as many as he could, but
other papers were scattered from Jersualem to America.
As Keynes points out, Newton was a suspicious, paranoid, unstable
personality. In 1692, Newton had a nervous breakdown and never
regained his former consistency of mind. Pepys and Locke thought
that he had become deranged. Newton emerged from his breakdown
slightly ``gaga.'' As Keynes stresses, Newton ``was wholly aloof
from women,'' although he had some close young male friends. He
once angrily accused John Locke of trying to embroil him with
women.
In the past decades, the lid of the box has been partially and
grudgingly opened by the Anglophile scholars who are the keepers of
the Newton myth. What can we see inside the box?
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/venscien.htm#newton
What you don't know about Newton
http://www.slate.com/id/2108438/
Newton, the Man by John Maynard
Keynes
It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own
home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the
records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to
be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The
war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a
theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to
verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay
before you today is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you
will excuse me.
One other preliminary matter. I believe that Newton was
different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not
believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more
extraordinary, than the nineteenth century cared to make him out.
Geniuses are very peculiar. Let no one here suppose that my object
today is to lessen, by describing, Cambridge's greatest son. I am
trying rather to see him as his own friends and contemporaries saw
him. And they without exception regarded him as one of the greatest
of men.
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought
of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a
rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and
untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who
has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he
finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed,
have come down to us, can see him like that.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was
the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and
Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and
intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build
our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years
ago.
Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas
Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do
sincere and appropriate homage...
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html
