Clippings

[Newton’s] papers began to appear in the early twentieth century, when cash-poor nobility sold them at auction and they scattered to collectors in Europe and across the Atlantic. … Interest was slight, but the economist and Cantabrigian John Maynard Keynes, disturbed, as he said, by the impiety, managed to buy some at the auction and then gradually reassembled more than a third of the collection. What he found there amazed him: the alchemist; the heretical theologian; not the cold rationalist Blake had so despised but a genius more peculiar and extraordinary. An “intense and flaming spirit.” …

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes told a few students and fellows in a shadowed room at Trinity College. “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.”

The Royal Society had never actually agreed to print the book. Indeed, it had only underwritten the publication of one book before, a lavish and disastrously unsuccessful two-volume History of Fishes. After much discussion the council members did vote to order the Principia printed—but by Halley, at his own expense. They offered him leftover copies of History of Fishes in place of his salary.

I asked him where he had it made, he said he made it himself, & when I asked him where he got his tools said he made them himself & laughing added if I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me, I had never made anything. …