MOTOR FORCE OF THE WORLD MACHINE 263 



at a salary of 1500 a year instead. The times had wonder- 

 fully changed. Revolution and counter-revolution, the wars of 

 Catholics and Anglicans and Independents, had left England 

 the freest country in Europe. The reign of Charles II. was a 

 sort of Golden Age in English science. Weak and profligate 

 monarch as he was, the kingdom prospered. The toleration he 

 had encouraged was the downfall of his successor. The Principia 

 came forth a year before the quietest revolution in English 

 annals. Instead of Galileo's prison, when they began to realise 

 Newton's greatness and found that he was poor, they gave him 

 a position first of Warden, then of Master, of the Mint. The 

 Royal Society soon elected him its president was proud to 

 retain him there through four- and- twenty years. He enjoyed 

 his fame ; the anchorite and recluse became a good liver ; death 

 did not reach him until the ripe age of eighty-five. They 

 throned him in Westminster Abbey ; peers carried his pall. It 

 was a singular contrast from the fate of his great forerunner, 

 who had died the year of Newton's birth, banished from associa- 

 tion with his fellows, imprisoned and disgraced, at first denied a 

 decent burial. 



Yet the work of Newton was far more atheistical than that 

 of Galileo. Leibnitz, then rising to his place as one of the most 

 widely read philosophers of Europe, declared that " Mr. Newton 

 robs the Deity of some of his most excellent attributes, and has 

 sapped the foundations of natural religion." No matter ; it is 

 a Cambridge divine who translates the Principia into English 

 and becomes one of its warmest defenders. There arose in the 

 English Church a sort of school, bent on establishing a new 

 theology, based upon the new conception of the world as a 

 mechanism. You see a last expression of it in the famous work 

 of Paley. 



Curiously enough, in this development of his own philosophy 

 Newton took no part. He spent a goodly share of his remain- 

 ing days writing theological dissertations and tracts. They 

 betray no gleam of the new light he himself had brought. 

 Coming from such a mind, they are amazing products ; they 

 would be inexplicable if we did not know of the unhappy fatality 

 which befell him shortly after the publication of the Principia 

 and to all intents closed his scientific career. There seems to 

 be little doubt or question that the strain which the production 

 of the Principia involved told heavily upon Newton's strength. 



