Isaac Newton — from the fourth edition of the Opticks (London, 1730), at Project Gutenberg.
The two of the thirty-one questions closing the Opticks in which Newton follows natural philosophy to its end in God. The twenty-eighth argues against filling space with a medium and asks whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain, and whether space is not the Sensory of a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent; the thirty-first, after a long survey of chemical attraction, ends with God forming matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles in the beginning, and with the hope that natural philosophy perfected will enlarge moral philosophy too. Both are given whole, since the theology closes an argument that begins with light and salts.
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