228 
ASTRONOMY. 
To conclude: In astronomy, the great thing is to raise 
the imagination to the subject, and that oftentimes in oppo¬ 
sition to the impression made upon the senses. An allu¬ 
sion, for example, must be gotten over, arising from the 
distance at which we view the heavenly bodies, viz. the 
apparent slowness of their motions. The moon shall take 
some hours in getting half a yard from a star which it 
touched. A motion so deliberate, we may think easily gui¬ 
ded. But what is the fact? The moon, in fact, is, all this 
while, driving through the heavens, at the rate of consid¬ 
erably more than two thousand miles in an hour; which is 
more than double of that with which a ball is shot off from 
the mouth of a cannon. Yet is this prodigious rapidity as 
much under government, as if the planet proceeded ever 
so slowly, or were conducted in its course inch by inch. 
It is also difficult to bring the imagination to conceive (what 
yet, to judge tolerably of the matter, it is necessary to con¬ 
ceive) how loose , if we may so express it, the heavenly 
bodies are. Enormous globes, held by nothing, confined 
by nothing, are turned into free and boundless space, each 
to seek its course by the virtue of an invisible principle; 
but a principle, one, common, and the same in all; and as¬ 
certainable. To preserve such bodies from being lost, from 
running together in heaps, from hindering and distracting 
one another’s motions, in a degree inconsistent with any 
continuing order; i. e. to cause them to form planetary sys¬ 
tems, systems that, when formed, can be upheld, and more 
especially, systems accommodated to the organized and 
sensitive natures which the planets sustain, as we know to 
be the case, where alone we can know what the case is, 
upon our earth: all this requires an intelligent interposi¬ 
tion, because it can be demonstrated concerning it, that it 
requires an adjustment of force, distance, direction, and ve¬ 
locity, out of the reach of chance to have produced; an 
adjustment, in its view to utility, similar to that which we 
see in ten thousand subjects of nature which are nearer to 
us, but in power, and in extent of space through which 
that power is exerted, stupendous. 
But many of the heavenly bodies, as the sun and fixed 
stars, are stationary. Their rest must be the effect of an 
powerful influences of an intelligent, free, and most potent agent. The 
same powers, therefore, which at present govern the material universe, 
and conduct its various motions, are very different from those which 
were necessary to have produced it from nothing, or to have disposed it 
in the admirable form in which it now proceeds.”-— Maclaurin's Ac¬ 
count of Newton's Phil. p. 407, ed. 3. 
