The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
On page 56…
Newton’s theological and alchemical writings went largely unexamined for two centuries after his death. In 1936, John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Newton’s notes at auction. He read aghast. Newton was not the first inhabitant of the modern world, Keynes declared, but “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 ten thousand years ago.”