The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

Thus far I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity. Indeed, this force arises from some cause that penetrates as far as the centers of the sun and planets without any diminution of its power to act, and that acts not in proportion to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles on which it acts (as mechanical causes are wont to do) but in proportion to the quantity of solid matter, and whose action is extended everywhere to immense distances, always decreasing as the squares of the distances.

Every body persists in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces having impact upon it.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore.

Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And, according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing.

I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy.