“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 world rather less
than 10,000 years ago... Why do I call him a magician? Because he
looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret
which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence,
certain mystic clues... He believed these clues were to be found
partly... in certain papers and traditions handed down by the
brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic
revelation in Babylon. ”
The economist John
Maynard Keynes, “Newton the Man,” The Royal
Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (1947), p. 29,
cited in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha Von Dechind, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of
Time, p. 9, emphasis in the original.