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Newton was not the first of the age of reason.

I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that.

‘In the eighteenth century and since,’ Keynes told the club, ‘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. He spent several years studying the documents–mainly manuscripts and notebooks–and in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in London in which he presented an entirely new view of ‘history’s most renowned and exalted scientist’. The papers were bought by another Cambridge man, the distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes). In 1936, a collection of papers by Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist and natural philosopher, which had been considered to be ‘of no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, came up for auction at Sotheby’s, the international salesroom, in London. All the obvious areas are tackled: the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internet.A History Of Thought And Invention, From Fire To Freud Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life. Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought: tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated. In this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world. ‘An extraordinary new book … This is the history of “ideas” as it has never presented before’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH A highly ambitious and lucid history of ideas from the very earliest times to the present day.