The best-known statement along these lines is that of John Maynard Keynes (who had bought some of the Newton papers in the 1936 auction at Sotheby’s): “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.”
