MIRACLES AND SPECIAL PROVIDENCES. 27 



servation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence 

 it is, that when those whose education has been derived 

 from the ancients speak of ' the reason of man/ they 

 are apt to omit from their conception of reason one of 

 its most important factors. Well, Newton slowly 

 marshalled his thoughts, or rather they came to him 

 while he ' intended his mind/ rising lik a series of in- 

 tellectual births out of chaos. He made this idea of 

 attraction his own. But, to apply the idea to the solar 

 system, it was necessary to know the magnitude of the 

 attraction, and the law of its variation with the dis- 

 tance. His conceptions first of all passed from the 

 action of the earth as a whole, to that of its constituent 

 particles. And persistent thought brought more and 

 more clearly out the final conclusion, that every parti- 

 cle of matter attracts every other particle with a force 

 varying inversely as the square of the distance between 

 the particles. 



Here we have the flower and outcome of Newton's 

 induction; and how to verify it, or to disprove it, was 

 the next question. The first step of the philosopher in 

 this direction was to prove, mathematically, that if this 

 law of attraction be the true one; if the earth be con- 

 stituted of particles which obey this law; then the ac- 

 tion of a sphere equal to the earth in size on a body 

 outside of it, is the same as that which would be ex- 

 erted if the whole mass of the sphere were contracted 

 to a point at its centre. Practically speaking, then, 

 the centre of the earth is the point from which dis- 

 tances must be measured to bodies attracted by the 

 earth. 



From experiments executed before this time, New- 

 ton knew the amount of the earth's attraction at the 

 earth's surface, or at a distance of 4,000 miles from 

 its centre. His object now was to measure the attrac- 



