•I'lO PHILOSOPHICAL THANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1728. 



understanding ; and that the absurdest things in the world have been asserted 

 and maintained, by persons whose education and studies should seem to have 

 furnished them with the greatest extent of science. 



That knowledge in many languages and terms of art, and in the history of 

 opinions and romantic hypotheses of philosophers, should sometimes be of no 

 effect in correcting men's judgment, is not so much to be wondered at. But 

 that in mathematics themselves, which are a real science, and founded in the 

 necessary nature of things ; men of very great abilities in abstract computa- 

 tions, when they come to apply those computations to the nature of things, 

 should persist in maintaining the most palpable absurdities, and in refusing to 

 see some of the most evident and obvious truths ; is very strange. 



An extraordinary instance of this, we have had of late years in very eminent 

 mathematicians, Mr. Leibnitz, Mr. Herman, Mr. Gravesande, and Mr. Ber- 

 nouilli ; who, in order to raise a dust of opposition against Sir Isaac Newton's 

 Philosophy, the glory of which is the application of abstract mathematics to 

 the real phaenomena of nature, have for some years insisted with great eager- 

 ness, on a principle which subverts all science, and which may easily be made 

 appear, even to an ordinary capacity, to be contrary to the necessary and es- 

 sential nature of things. 



What they contend for, is, that the force of any body in motion, is propor- 

 tional, not to its velocity, but to the square of its velocity. The absurdity of 

 which notion, I shall first make appear, and then show what it is that has led 

 these gentlemen into error. 



In the nature of things, it is evident, that every effect must necessarily be 

 proportionate to the cause of that effect ; that is, to the action of the cause, 

 or the power exerted at the time when the effect is produced. To suppose any 

 effect proportional to the square or cube of its cause, is to suppose that an 

 effect arises partly from its cause, and partly from nothing.* 



This great man, who had enjoyed a uniform state of health, was suddenly seized with a pain in 

 his side May 1 1, 1729, of which he died 6' days after. The same year appeared his Exposition of 

 the Church Catechism, and 10 volumes of his Sermons. 



Bishop Hoadly's character of Dr. Clarke, though high, is not extravagant. Observing how ex- 

 traordinary it is that a man should possess an equal degree of excellence in different branches of 

 knowledge, he says, " It ought to be remarked, in how particular a manner, and to how high a 

 degree, divinity and mathematics, experimental philosophy and classical learning, metaphysics and 

 critical skill, all of them various and different, as they are among themselves, united in Dr. Clarke." 



* Which is just like the supposition made by those mathematicians, who have taken it for granted, 

 that ^ is equal to infinite; that is, that as to 1, so 1 is to infinite; that is, that infinite multiplied 

 by (), is equal to 1, or an infinite number of nothings equal to something; which is palpably false. 

 The true proportion is, not as to 1, so 1 to infinite; but as an infinitesimal is to 1, so is 1 to infinite. 



