ABSTRACT
“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.” Thus wrote the British economist John Maynard Keynes in the early 1940s in a paper he had prepared for the tercentenary of Isaac Newton’s birth. The man that Keynes describes is the Newton of contemporary popular culture. This is the Newton of scientific rationalism, the modern secular age, and the clockwork universe. The roots of this conception can be traced back to Enlightenment apologists who championed Newton’s empiricism and the mechanistic features of the Principia while they downplayed or neglected Newton’s theological agenda for his natural philosophy. In the writings of Voltaire, in D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie (1751), and in numerous other works of the Enlightenment, Newton was presented as the patron saint of the Age of Reason.
