MIRACLES AND SPECIAL PROVIDENCES 81 



planetary motion known as *' Kepler's laws/* It had 

 been observed that a magnet attracts iron; and by one 

 of those flashes of inspiration which reveal to the human 

 mind the vast in the minute, the general in the particu- 

 lar, it had been inferred that the force by which bodies 

 fall to the earth might also be an attraction. Newton 

 pondered all these things. He looked, as was his wont, 

 into the darkness until it became entirely luminous. 

 How this light arises we cannot explain; but, as a mat- 

 ter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here that this 

 kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients 

 could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for 

 the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleas- 

 ant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding 

 over facts. Hence it is that when those whose educa- 

 tion has been derived from the ancients speak of *'the 

 reason of man,'* they are apt to omit from their concep- 

 tion 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 like 

 a series of intellectual 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 particle of matter at- 

 tracts 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 



