270 ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. BookIL 



If this machinery, extraordinary as it is, could have been extended 

 from t'le heavens to the earth, and it could have been fliown, that 

 things here, I mean animals and vegetables, and the minute particles 

 of ma|:ter, were moved ia the fame v^ay, Sir Ifaac's fyftem, as I have 

 already obferved, would have been more fimple and uniform, and his 

 philolophy would have been, as his followers boaft, univerfal. But, 

 as that is not pretended to be the cafe, his fyilem of nature is, in this 

 refped, incongruous, without that fimplicity and uniformity of de- 

 fign, fo remarkable in all the works of nature. And this incongruity be- 

 twixt Sir Ifaac^s fyftem of the heavens and of the earth, muft ajjpear 

 the more extraordinary, when we confider, that his whole fyftem is 

 built upon the analogy betwixt certain motions on earth and thofe in 

 heaven. 



Had Sir Ifaac ftudied the books of antient philofophy, which It does 

 not appear he ever looked into, probably for want of knowledge of 

 the language in which they are written, he would have formed a more 

 comprehenfive idea oi philofophy .^ and what a ph'ilofopher fhould be. He 

 would have learned there, that -philofophy is the bioivledge of all things 

 divine and human ; that is, of things eteroal and unchangeable, as 

 well as of things perpetually fluctuating betwixt generation and cor- 

 ruption, that is, betwixt being and no being : And that, however ex- 

 cellent a mathematician or mechanic a man may be, however accu- 

 rate and fagacioiis he may be in making experiments, without that u- 

 niverfal knowledge, he is no philofopher, but is only pofl^efl^ed of 

 inferior arts and fciences, which may be ufed as minifters or 



hand a: aids to philofophy. From thefe books, he would have 



learned to know, what body and mind^ matter and motion^ in their 

 full extent, are ; and thence he would have difcovered, that mind 

 was not only principal in nature, but as univerfal as body^ as 

 "different in kind and degree, and the author of all the motions in 

 body ; confequently, that Nature was nothing elfe but what Ariftotle 

 has made it to be, mind in body^ or, as that philofopher has expreft^ed it, 



