far as religion is good for any thing, your natural knowledge of moral rectitude and obliquity in you and every other mortal, so clear and so well backed by the truth of actions; "the eternal fitness of things, and of actions to things; the sense of beauty in virtue, which sufficiently rewards itself, and of deformity in vice which sufficiently punishes itself, in the instant of either performance or committal; together with the strong moral sympathy," that natural instinct, whereby you feel through one another, as if you all had but one and the same heart; it is, I say, astonishing, that all these should have tolerated among you (for I speak, as you do, of all men) so many rapes, robberies, murders, wars, &c. in all ages of the world. Priestcraft, you say, accounts for it all. For a great deal, I confess, but not the thousandth part of it. But now (as to so much of it, or the whole, if you please), as you charge it to the account of priestcraft, I beg to know, how the artifice of priests could possibly have stolen in upon a world, so enlightened, so animated for virtue, and against vice such a mass of detested enormities, and so generally practised? How could it have carried with it a single individual, not to say, almost the whole human race, into the general practice of the most venial transgressions? On your way of talking, it might be as easy to kidnap nine tenths of our congress, and our parliament, the chief governor among the rest, at noonday, in the sight of all our army and volunteers, to ship them for America, and to sell them there for a shilling a-piece of paper money. Should any thing like justice be ever done to this state of our argument, it would certainly induce a wish, that revelation were resumed, were it not that revelation is considered as a satire on mankind, drawn forth from the bad hearts of those who have handed it to us; whereas the advocates of natural light, as if they had sat to themselves, give us so flattering a picture of mankind, so overrun with benevolence, and all the other virtues, so philosophical, so wise, so very good, that for our own credit, we cannot help admiring it as perfectly just and extremely like ourselves. To find fault with it is too humiliating; or to allow, that the ugly picture, done for us by revelation, carries a greater resemblance, is to own ourselves a very sad sort of creatures; to renounce our vanity and pleasures, and to sneak off into an abject state of fear and penitence. And now, sir, how hath virtue thriven under the moral tweedledum of your ethic writers and its present echo from our pulpits? You perceive, I believe, that though our fine folks like that tune much better, than one of Corellis Solemn Strains, performed to a hymn, they are not much disposed to take the floor and dance to it; and that the few who are, trouble themselves but little about either your favourite tune, or their own steps. 10. For my own part, I with grief and shame confess, that I rather know what wisdom is than am wise. Knowledge and wisdom are very different things. Although I perfectly know the way to a distant town, and all the by-paths that branch from that way, yet, in travelling thither, if my limbs are weak, I may stumble; or if my eyes are bad, or my attention dissipated, I may strike off into some of those paths. A man absolutely blind, by taking a great deal of care, and feeling after that way, might haply find it better than I. The true wisdom of man undoubtedly is this,-first, to know what is that real happiness, in comparison of which all other enjoyments are but misery; secondly, to know how that happiness may be safely and surely obtained; and thirdly, in an uniform obedience of the heart and will to these two primary articles of wisdom, steadily to pursue the ways and means, pointed out by the second article, in order to the happy end. Nothing in mathematics admits of a clearer demonstration than this little chain of three links; and every thing in that, and other branches of knowledge, is infinitely trifling compared with this. The perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, and the longitude itself! what are they to this? Now, this wisdom is not to be derived but from the Father of lights;' and is no where to be found but in the true religion. To enjoy God to all eternity is true happiness. Christ, with the piety and virtue which he inculcates, is the only way to that happiness. The heart, the will, the whole soul, having received this doctrine from the understanding, with all their warmth, as coming immediately from Christ and his Holy Spirit, bear the man so high above this world, that he looks down at it as a very little thing, and on all the cares laid out upon it, and all the philosophy employed about it, as despicably trifling in themselves, and as fatally pernicious in their consequences. Yet this age of refinement in pride, vanity, and pleasure, must add philosophy to its other luxuries. Every blockhead must be a little Aristotle or Newton, just as every shopkeeper must affect the figure of a lord. But what would their philosophy avail them, if they could not erect it into a battery against religion? if it could not help them to stifle conscience, that troublesome inmate, so apt to clamour at knavery and lewdness? There is a reciprocal intoleration between conscience and its effects, on the one side, and luxury, especially philosophical luxury, with its brood of vices, on the other; and who can endure their endless struggles? This, and infinite conceit, have produced a prodigious swarm of very minute philosophers, of whom many cannot so much as read; that flutter like gnats, about religion, biting, stinging, and perishing in their impotent attempts. With these, the appellation of philosopher, at first modestly assumed, as only a lover of knowledge, is now made to stand for a wise, or very knowing man. Under this honorary title they thrust into company with Paschal, Bacon, and Newton; and then, who should speak, who should declaim against religion, but they? In every corner we have a Robin Hood of these insects, who having heard that Newton was infallible in all his opinions, and a staunch Arian, set up for buzzing and biting at the Trinity. But now, as to Newton, though at a prodigious distance I venerate his memory as a most consummate mathematician, I cannot allow him the epithet of infallible, even in natural philosophy and mathematics, his grand fort, much less in matters of religion wherein I am able to prove him most grossly erroneous, and even contradictory. He is, after all, but a borrower from the ancients, as to both his principle of attraction, and his attempt to square the circle. After having fully refuted Des Cartes on the subject of a plenum, a business of but little difficulty, he calls in attraction to account for gravity, as one of his two great organs, whereby the planets and comets are carried round their orbits; and after having, with amazing ability, demonstrated the laws whereby this principle of attraction operates, and shewn, that this power is found in all bodies, which attract one another reciprocally in proportion to their respective quantities of matter and their distances, he dare not call this a property of matter, which perhaps he might have safely done; but sometimes resolves it into the power of God, rightly, in my humble opinion, and why not, as well as the centrifugal or progressive motion of the planets? but, unphilosophically, as other great philosophers maintain, who are for shutting God out of his own works. And sometimes, ashamed to give no account but the power of God for the principle whereon he grounds almost the whole of his philosophy, he insinuates, that attraction may be the effect of a subtile spirit, a sort of equivocation, whereby, if he means any thing, he must mean somewhat of the same, or a similar nature, with the subtile matter of Des Cartes. All he says in reference to this subtile matter, for which he borrows the appellation of æther, he proposes as purely hypothetical. This fluid of his, he supposes, may surround the sun, and extend itself throughout the solar system; may be exceeding rare near the sun, and grow still denser and denser as its distance from that luminary increases; and endeavours to shew, that all he had ascribed to gravity and attraction, may possibly be thereby accounted for. This, however, he does in a way so futile and unsatisfactory, as, in that instance, to level the great Sir Isaac with the lowest class of thinkers and guessers. On this most important point he goes backward and forward, and wavers in a miserable manner. Here at best he is not absolutely infallible; but still less so in regard to the quadrature of the circle; wherein too he is but a borrower from Archimedes, and others, all prior to the age of Newton. For this (in my humble opinion, not very important purpose, and fitter to employ the talent of a philomath than a Newton) he and Leibnitz, much about the same time, struck out a fluxional method, which they both took for a demonstration. The mathematical disciples of these great men were, at first, of the same opinion, hallooing whatsoever came from them as infallible and perfect, but bitterly contending, some for Newton, and others for Leibnitz, as the first inventor. In England the genius of Newton was cried up as more than human, as somewhat above that of a created being, and still is by the servile crew. His apotheosis however began to be a little doubted of by a few, as soon as they found it had been borrowed, and on trial proved itself defective, and far short of a demonstration. On this, the mathematicians, blushing for their admiration, both of the author and the scheme, fell from the title they had given of a demonstration, to that of an approximation. What, after all! are we put off with an approximation only? We should be glad to know wherein this mathematical, is preferable to our old mechanical approximation. It would be hard upon the excise officers and supernumeraries, to go through a nice fluxion of infinitesimals in gauging a barrel of ale; and upon a surveyor of land, to give the acres, roods, perches, digits, in infinitesimals, and fractions of infinitesimals, in the dimensions of a common field. Query, however, whether there hath been any fluxional approximation really made? Objects, seen at a great distance, under a small angle, appear to be nearer to each other than they are; and then the great mathematician, working in a high cloud of in finitesimals, and seen by a little mathematician below in a dense fog of logarithms, may have seemed to baloon it nearer to the moon than he did. This disappointment reminds me of two lines in Boileau on the passage of the Rhine. That great poet, intending to give the world an epic on the subject, bids other poets celebrate the glorious exploits of Louis in other fields of action, and claims the arduous passage for himself, I suppose, as the most illustrious of the whole. Accordingly, he sets out with an invocation of Apollo and all the Muses, to aid him in the sublime attempt; but having brought his hero, with a huge army, to the river side, and described the formidable preparations of the allies on the other, he tells us, the generals of Louis, in the midst of no little swagger on his part, represented to him, how far it was beneath the majesty of the grand monarque to take the river, like a common soldier, and their arguments prevailed on a man not over rash in braving dangers of that sort. Then the poet, on a frisky tantrum of sublime, says, Louis, les animant de feu de son courage, Se plaint de sa grandeur, qui l'attaque au rivage. On which the parody of Prior is remarkable, And Boileau summon'd all the tuneful nine, To sing how Louis did-not pass the Rhine. It is to me astonishing, that the grand monarch of mathematics did not better consider two things; in the first place, the insignificance of a quadrature to every purpose, but his own glory; and in the next place, how impossible it was for him to succeed, even as to that, by the method he took. Surveyors, carpenters, gaugers, &c. going on merely mechanical principles, do well enough without squaring circles. They suppose, which is true, that the diameter of a circle is nearly equal to one-third part of the circumference; and stand in need of no other approximation. If it is self-evident, that the circle and its diameter reciprocally define each other, how is it possible to prove it? Is not this enough for use and practice? And why then. insufficient for science? And perhaps, after all, the mathematicians had better go back to mechanics, from whence all the science of lines and surfaces did certainly originate, that by trying up, as the carpenters call it, they may learn of the homely mother what they can never be taught by the Lady Geometry, as she is now tricked |