OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 271 



less various and desultory, it can hardly be doubted 

 that he would have arrived at a knowledge of the 

 law of gravitation. 



(301.) But every thing which had been done to- 

 wards this great end, before Newton, could only be 

 regarded as smoothing some first obstacles, and 

 preparing a state of knowledge, in which powers 

 like his could be effectually exerted. His wonderful 

 combination of mathematical skill with physical 

 research, enabled him to invent, at pleasure, new and 

 unheard-of methods of investigating the effects of 

 those causes which his clear and penetrating mind 

 detected in operation. Whatever department of 

 science he touched, he may be said to have formed 

 afresh. Ascending by a series of close-compacted 

 inductive arguments to the highest axioms of dy- 

 namical science, he succeeded in applying them to 

 the complete explanation of all the great astronomi- 

 cal phenomena, and many of the minuter and more 

 enigmatical ones. In doing this, he had every thing 

 to create : the mathematics of his age proved 

 totally inadequate to grapple with the numerous 

 difficulties which were to be overcome; but this, 

 so far from discouraging him, served only to afford 

 new opportunities for the exertion of his genius, 

 which, in the invention of the method of fluxions, 

 or, as it is now more generally called, the differential 

 calculus, has supplied a means of discovery, bearing 

 the same proportion to the methods previously in 

 use, that the steam-engine does to the mechanical 

 powers employed before its invention. Of the optical 

 discoveries of Newton we have already spoken ; and 

 if the magnitude of the objects of his astronomical 



