272 DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY 



discoveries excite our admiration of the mental 

 powers which could so familiarly grasp them, the 

 minuteness of the researches into which he there 

 set the first example of entering, is no less cal- 

 culated to produce a corresponding impression. 

 Whichever way we turn our view, we find ourselves 

 compelled to bow before his genius, and to assign 

 to the name of NEWTON a place in our veneration 

 which belongs to no other in the annals of science. 

 His era marks the accomplished maturity of the 

 human reason as applied to such objects. Every 

 thing which went before might be more properly 

 compared to the first imperfect attempts of child- 

 hood, or the essays of inexpert, though promising, 

 adolescence. Whatever has been since performed, 

 however great in itself, and worthy of so splendid 

 and auspicious a beginning, has never, in point of 

 intellectual effort, surpassed that astonishing one 

 which produced the Principia. 



(302.) In this great work, Newton shows all the 

 celestial motions known in his time to be conse- 

 quences of the simple law, that every particle of 

 matter attracts every other particle in the universe 

 with a force proportional to the product of their 

 masses directly, and the square of their mutual 

 distance inversely, and is itself attracted with an 

 equal force. Setting out from this, he explains how 

 an attraction arises between the great spherical 

 masses of which our system consists, regulated by 

 a law precisely similar in its expression ; how the 

 elliptic motions of planets about the sun, and of 

 satellites about their primaries, according to the 

 exact rules inductively arrived at by Kepler, result 



