Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/204

 1 82 ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. great principle, "Abandon substantial forms and occult qualities and reduce natural phenomena to mathematical laws," before he could crown the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler with his own. For this successful union of Bacon's experimental induction with the mathematical deduction of Descartes, this combination of the analytic and the syn- thetic methods, which was shown in the demand for, and the establishment of, mathematically formulated natural laws, presupposes that nature is deprived of all inner life * and all qualitative distinctions, that all that exists is compounded of uniformly acting parts, and that all that takes place is conceived as motion. With this Hobbes's programme of a mechanical science of nature is fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are made subject to the same law of gravitation. How far Newton himself adhered to the narrow meaning of mechanism (motion from pressure and impulse), is evident from the fact that, though he is often honored as the creator of the dynamical view of nature, he rejected actio indistans as absurd, and deemed it indispensable to assume some " cause " of gravity (consisting, probably, in the impact of imponderable material particles). It was his disciples who first ventured to proclaim gravity as the universal force of matter, as the " primary quality of all bodies " (so Roger Cotes in the preface to the second edition of the Principia, 17 is)- Newton resembles Boyle in uniting profound piety with the rigor of scientific thought. He finds the most certain proof for the existence of an intelligent creator in the won- derful arrangement of the world-machine, which does not need after-adjustment at the hands of its creator, and whose adaptation he praises as enthusiastically as he uncondition- ally rejects the mingling of teleological considerations in the explanation of physical phenomena. By this "physico- theological " argument he furnishes a welcome support to deism. While the finite mind perceives in the sensorium of the brain the images of objects which come to it from distinctions alone, is equivalent to an exanimation of nature had been clearly recognized by Poiret. As he significantly remarked : The principles of the Cartesian physics relate merely to the " cadaver" of nature {Erud., p. 260).
 * That the mathematical view of nature, since it leaves room for quantitative