1S13.] Sir Isaac Newton. 407 



information was prodigious, his activity was indefatigable, and 

 every region of knowledge which he traversed received marks of 

 his original and inventive genius. But he was far inferior to 

 Newton, both as a philosopher and as a man. None of his pro- 

 ductions will bear a comparison with the Principia, or the 

 Optics, of Sir Isaac Newton ; nor do we think any of his ma- 

 thematical writings equal to the Universal Arithmetic, or the 

 Fluctions of Newton. We cannot conclude this account better 

 than by giving the comparison between the two men, drawn up 

 by Newton himself, on occasion of this very controversy. 



" It must be allowed that these two gentlemen differ very 

 much in philosophy. The one proceeds on the evidence arising 

 from experiments and phenomena, and stops where such evi- 

 dence is wanting; the other is taken up with hypotheses, and 

 propounds them, not to be examined by experiments, but to be 

 believed without examination. The one, for want of experi- 

 ments to decide the question, does not affirm whether the cause 

 of gravitv be mechanical or not mechanical : the other, that it 

 is a perpetual miracle, if it be not mechanical. The one, by 

 way of inquiry, attributes it to the power of the Creator, that the 

 least particles" of matter are hard; the other, attributes the hard- 

 ness of matter to conspiring notions, and calls it a perpetual 

 miracle, if the cause of this hardness be other than mechanical. 

 The one does not affirm that animal motion in man is purely 

 mechanical : the other teaches that it is purely mechanical, the 

 soul or mind (according to the hypothesis of a harmonia praesta- 

 bilita) never acting on the body so as to alter or influence its 

 motions. The one teaches that God (the God in whom we live, 

 and move, and have our being,) is omnipresent ; but not a soul 

 of the world : the other, that he is not the soul of the world, 

 but intelligentia supra mundana, an intelligence above the 

 bounds of the world ; whence it seems to follow, that he cannot 

 do any thing within the bounds of the world, unless by an incre- 

 dible miracle. The one teaches, that philosophers are to argue 

 from phenomena and experiments to the causes thereof, and 

 thence to the causes of those causes, and so mi till we come to 

 the first cause : the other, that all the actions of the first cause 

 are miracles, and all the laws impressed on nature by the will ot 

 God are perpetual miracles and occult qualities, and, therefore, 

 not to be considered in philosophy. But, must the constant and 

 universal laws of Nature, if derived from the power of God, or 

 the action of a cause not yet known to us, be called miracles and 

 occult qualities, that is to say, wonders and absurdities ? Must 

 all the arguments for a God, taken from the phenomena of 

 nature, be exploded by new hard names ? And must experi- 

 mental philosophy be exploded as miraculous and absurd, because 



