NEW ESSAYS 389 



I cannot but praise the modest piety of our celebrated 

 author, who recognizes that God can do beyond what we 

 can understand, and that thus there may be inconceivable 

 mysteries in the articles of faith ; but I would rather 

 that we were not compelled to have recourse to miracle 

 in the ordinary course of nature and to admit absolutely 

 inexplicable powers and operations. Otherwise too great 

 a licence will be given to bad philosophers on the strength 

 of what God can do ; and if we admit those centripetal 

 powers [vertus] 182 or those immediate attractions from a dis- 

 tance, without its being possible to make them intelligible, 



13 -' In Nouveaux Essais, bk.ii. ch. 8, n, he calls them vires centripetae 

 (E. 231 b ; G. v. 1 18). Cf. Antibarbarus Physicuspro Philosophia reali contra 

 ren&cationes qualitatum scholasticarum et intelligentiarum chimaericarum 

 (G. vii. 342) : ' And all who are not content to recognize with us 

 qualities which are so far occult, that is, which are unknown, have 

 supposed qualities which are perpetually occult, d/J/Ji/Toi, inexplic- 

 able, which not even the highest spirit [genius] could thoroughly 

 know and make intelligible. Such are they who, led on by the 

 success of the observation that the large bodies of the world exert 

 among themselves and upon their own perceptible parts the 

 attraction of this system, suppose that every body is attracted by 

 every other through the very force of matter ; whether, as it were, 

 like feels like and delights in it even from afar, or whether God by 

 a perpetual miracle secures that they shall strive towards one 

 another, as if they had feeling. However that may be, these people 

 neither can reduce attraction to impulse or to explicable reasons (as 

 Plato did in the Timaeus) nor do they wish they could. ... It is 

 surprising that even now, in the great light of this age, there are 

 some who hope to persuade the world of a doctrine so opposed to 

 reason. John Locke, in the first edition of his Essay on the Under- 

 standing, declared rightly, and in accordance with the mechanical 

 physics established by his illustrious countrymen, Hobbes, Boyle, 

 and their numerous followers, that no body is moved except by the 

 impulse of a body coming into contact with it. But afterwards 

 (obeying, I think, the authority of his friends rather than his own 

 judgment) he withdrew this opinion, and held that there may lie 

 hid in the essence of matter I know not what extraordinary things 

 [mirabilia] ; which is just as if one were to think that there are 

 occult qualities in number, time, space and motion, taken by them- 

 selves, that is to say. as if one were to seek a knot in a bulrush ' 

 [a difficulty where there is none], ' or to try deliberately to make 

 clear things obscure.' 



