Jonathan Rée reviews ‘Newton and the Origin of Civilisation’ by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold · LRB 10 October 2013: By that time he had settled into a steady habit of suspicion: he trusted nobody, and refused to believe anything that he couldn’t reduce to mathematical terms and prove for himself from first principles. In particular, he trained himself to doubt the evidence of sensory experience: sensible qualities were events in our bodies rather than features of the objective world, and sense organs, like any other mechanical instruments, were liable to bias, inconsistency and malfunction.