Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Sir Isaac Newton

The investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis ought ever to precede the method of composition.

Against filling the heavens with fluid mediums, unless they be exceeding rare, a great objection arises from the regular and very lasting motions of the planets and comets in all manner of courses through the heavens.

I find more sure marks of the authenticity of the Bible than in any profane history whatever…. Worshipping God and the Lamb in the temple: God, for his benefaction in creating all things, and the Lamb, for his benefaction in redeeming us with his blood.

It became him who created them to set them in order: and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature.

We are not to consider the world as the body of God: he is an uniform being, void of organs, members, or parts; and they are his creatures, subordinate to him, and subservient to his will.

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that those primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them: even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.

Whatever I have done is due to patient thought.

The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like questions.

To derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy.

The synthesis consists in assuming the causes discovered and established as principles, and by them explaining the phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the explanations.