Were it possible for the departed soul of Newton to feel pain, he would surely recollect with regret that unhappy hour, when provoked by Dr. Hooke's charge of plagiarism, he first threw out his whim of a vibrating ether, to shew what might be made of an hypothesis.—For Sir Isaac Newton must be allowed to have paved the way for much of the atomical philosophy of the moderns.
Newton's æther is assumed as a fac totum by every precipitate sciolist, who, in despite of logic, and in contradiction to all the principles of mechanics, gives us theories of muscular motion, of animal sensation, and even of intelligence and volition, by the undulations of ætherial fluids.
Not one of a hundred of these theorists can go through the fundamental theorem of all this doctrine, the 47th prop. of the 2d book of the Principia, and not one in a thousand know that Newton's investigation is inconclusive.—Yet they talk of the effects and modifications of those undulations as familiarly and confidently as if they could demonstrate the propositions in Euclid's Elements.
Yet such is the reason that satisfies Dr. Priestly.—But I do not suppose that he has yet attained his acme of Illumination. His genius has been cramped by British prejudices.—These need not sway his mind any longer. He is now in that "rara temporis (et loci) felicitate, ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet,"—in the country which was honoured by giving the world the first avowed edition of the Age of Reason, with the name of the shop and publisher. I make no doubt but that his mind will now take a higher flight,—and we may expect to see him fire "that train by which he boasted that he would blow up the religious establishment of his stupid and enslaved native country."—Peace be with him.—But I grieve that he has left any of his friends and abettors among us, who declaim, in the most violent and unqualified terms,