CHAPTER XX 



NEWTON AND THE MOTOR FORCE OF THE 

 WORLD MACHINE 



IN the idle days of the long gone by, and especially with the 

 revival of learning, men were wont to indulge in disputes, often 

 lively, sometimes acrimonious, as to the superiority, especially 

 in matters of the intellect, of the ancients or the moderns. 



Regard the matter as we may, among moderns at least the 

 first place by a sort of common consent of mankind, without 

 regard to nationality or calling, is awarded to Sir Isaac Newton. 

 Without doubt, if one were asked to point to a single volume 

 through all the ranges of literature, whether ancient or modern, 

 which exhibits in the highest degree the powers of the human 

 mind, one would fix without further thought upon Newton's 

 Principia. It is amazing to reflect that it was as sheerly a 

 product of chance as any event to which one might point. 



Various letters make it clear that Newton himself had no 

 intention whatever of writing the Principia, though he was 

 forty-four when he began it. But for the accident of a visit 

 from young Edmund Halley in 1684, it is unlikely it ever would 

 have been undertaken. Probably no book ever issued announced 

 discoveries so great alike in number and importance ; had it not 

 been for the importunate urgings of his disciple, they probably 

 would have been buried among Newton's papers, perhaps to 

 be exhumed as curiosities long after his death. Newton him- 

 self would have been known to his contemporaries only as an 

 amazingly ingenious mathematician who had invented fluxions, 

 who discovered dispersion, and devised the reflecting telescope. 



His life, unruffled by tragedy, hardly by events, was, in an 

 outward way, as commonplace as that of a railway president. 

 He was born in the year of Galileo's death. He came up to 

 Cambridge in 1660, the year of the Restoration, the year of the 

 founding of the Royal Society, and while blind Milton, hunted 



by the partisans of the king, sought for a shelter for his head. 



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