32 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



they are confined to an inch. All direct ratios of 

 the distance are excluded, on account of danger 

 from perturbing forces :^" all reciprocal ratios, ex- 

 cept what lie beneath the cube of the distance » 

 by the demonstrable consequence, that every the 

 least change of distance would, under the opera- 

 tion of such laws, have been fatal to the repose 

 and order of the system. We do not know, that 

 is, we seldom reflect, how interested we are in 

 this matter. Small irregularities may be endur- 

 ed ; but, changes within these limits being allowed 

 for, the permanency of our ellipse is a question of 

 life and death to our whole sensitive world. 



(*) III. That the subsisting law of attraction 

 falls within the limits which utility requires, when 



'" It has been objected to this statement, and the one in p. 31, 

 that such a result would not inevitably happen from planets in any 

 number attracting each other with forces increasing in the direct 

 ratio of their distances, as, indeed. Sir Isaac Newton has shown 

 (Principia, lib. i., prop. 64,) how they would revolve in equal times 

 and in elliptical orbits. (See also the 10th and 5Sth propositions.) 

 In truth, all motion in elliptical orbits is connected with an in- 

 crease of the force in the direct ratio of the radius vector, if the 

 centre of the figure be the centre offerees, of which Bishop Brink- 

 ley must have been, of course, aware — See p. 30. But if the 

 statement in the text be taken to include the action of other bodies 

 and systems, on the supposition that the attraction is universal, — 

 which, it must be remembered, is involved in the very hypothesis 

 of its increasing with the distance, — there seems no solid objec- 

 tion to this part, at least, of the observation ; for a rushing together 

 of all the systems, the solar and those of the fixed stars, would be 

 the consequence of the attraction increasing according to any 

 power of the distance, while those systems had no motion of pro- 

 jection. 



