Quotes from Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
p. 36 ‘The picture of history was completely false, but Newton and many others had boundless faith in what they called “the wisdom of the ancients”. (The belief fit neatly with the doctrine that the world was in decline.) Newton went so far to insist that ancient thinkers know all about gravity, too, including the specifics of the law of universal gravitation, the very law that all the world considered Newton’s greatest discovery.
God had revealed those truths long ago, but they had been lost. The ancient Egyptians and Hebrews has rediscovered them. So had the Greeks, and, now, so had Newton. The great thinkers of past ages had expressed their discoveries in cryptic language, to hide them from the unworthy, but Newton had cracked the code.’