118 DISSERTATION SECOND. [pa B t u. 



same objects at the same time with himself, placed in a 

 situation equally favourable. 



When one considers the splendour of Newton's dis- 

 coveries, the beauty, the simplicity, and grandeur of the 

 system they unfolded, and the demonstrative evidence by 

 which that system was supported, one could hardly doubt, 

 that, to be received, it required only to be made known, 

 and that the establishment of the Newtonian philosophy 

 all over Europe would very quickly have followed the 

 publication of it. In drawing this conclusion, however, we 

 should make much too small an allowance . for the influ- 

 ence of received opinion, and the resistance that mere 

 habit is able, for a time, to oppose to the strongest evi- 

 dence. The Cartesian system of vortices had many fol- 

 lowers in all the countries of Europe, and particularly in 

 France. In the universities of England, though the Aris- 

 totelian physics had made an obstinate resistance, they had 

 been supplanted by the Cartesian, which became firmly 

 established about the time when their foundation began to 

 be sapped by the general progress of science, and particu- 

 larly by the discoveries of Newton. For more than thirty 

 years after the publication of those discoveries, the system 

 of vortices kept its ground, and a translation from the 

 French into Latin of the Physics of Rohault, a work entire- 

 ly Cartesian, continued at Cambridge to be the text for 

 philosophical instruction. About the year 1713, a new 

 and more elegant translation of the same book was pub- 

 lished by Dr. Samuel Clarke, with the addition of notes, 

 in which that profound and ingenious writer explained the 

 views of Newton on the principal objects of discussion, so 

 that the notes contained virtually a refutation of the text ; 

 they did so, however, only virtually, all appearance of ar- 

 gument and controversy being carefully avoided. Whether 

 this escaped the notice of the learned Doctors or not is 



