328 RELIGIOUS VIEWS. 



chanism of the heavens; such for instance as 

 D'Alembert, Clairault, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace. 

 But it is still important to recollect, that the 

 mental employments of men, while they are oc- 

 cupied in this portion of the task of the formation 

 of science, are altogether different from that which 

 takes place in the mind of a discoverer, who, for 

 the first time, seizes the principle which connects 

 phenomena before unexplained, and thus adds 

 another original truth to our knowledge of the 

 universe. In explaining, as the great mathema- 

 ticians just mentioned have done, the phenomena 

 of the solar system by means of the law of uni- 

 versal gravitation, the conclusions at which they 

 arrived were really included in the truth of the 

 law, whatever skill and sagacity it might require 

 to develope and extricate them from the general 

 principle. But when Newton conceived and 

 established the law itself, he added to our know- 

 ledge something which was not contained in 

 any truth previously known, nor deducible from 

 it by any course of mere reasoning. And the 

 same distinction, in all other cases, obtains, be- 

 tween these processes which establish the prin- 

 ciples, generally few and simple, on which our 

 sciences rest, and those reasonings and calcula- 

 tions, founded on the principles thus obtained, 

 which constitute by far the larger portion of the 

 common treatises on the most complete of the 

 sciences now cultivated. 



