54 DISSERTATION SECOND. [rARTii. 



rent measures of force, when any mechanical problem was 

 proposed concerning the action of bodies, whether at rest 

 or in motion, resolved it in the same manner, and arrived 

 exactly at the same conclusions. It was therefore evident, 

 that, however much their language and words were opposed, 

 their ideas or opinions exactly agreed. In reality, the two 

 parties were not at issue on the question ; their positions, 

 though seemingly opposite, were not contrary to one an- 

 other ; and after debating for nearly thirty years, they found 

 out this to be the truth. That the first men in the scientific 

 world should have disputed so long with one another, with- 

 out discovering that their opposition was only in words, and 

 that this should have happened, not in any of the obscure 

 and tortuous tracts through which the human mind must 

 grope its way in anxiety and doubt, but in one of the clearest 

 and straightest roads, where it used to be guided by the light 

 of demonstration, is one of the most singular facts in the his- 

 tory of human knowledge. 



The degree of acrimony and illiberality which were some- 

 times mixed in this controversy was not very creditable to 

 the disputants, and proved how much more men take an in- 

 terest in opinions as being their own, than as being simply 

 in themselves either true or false. The dispute, as con- 

 ducted by S'Gravesende and Clarke, took this turn, es- 

 pecially on the part of the latter, who, in the schools of 

 theology having sharpened both his temper and his wit, ac- 

 companied his reasonings with an insolence and irritability 

 peculiarly ill suited to a discussion about matter and motion. 

 His paper on this subject, in the Philosophical Transactions* 

 contains many just and acute remarks, accompanied with the 

 most unfair representation of the argument of his antagonists, 



1 Vol. XXXV. (1728), p. 381. Hutton's Abridgment, Vol. 

 VII. p. 219. 



