Thus, the diligent student of science, the earnest seeker of truth, led, as through the courts of a sacred Temple, wherein, at each step, new wonders meet the eye, till, as a crowning grace, they stand before a Holy of Holies, and learn that all science and all truth are one which hath its beginning and its end in the knowledge of Him whose glory the heavens declare, and whose handiwork the firmament showeth forth. The introduction of the pure and lofty doctrines of the PRINCIPIA was perseveringly resisted. Descartes, with his system of vortices, had sown plausibly to the imagination, and error had struck down deeply, and shot up luxuriantly, not only in the popular, but in the scientific mind. Besides the idea—in itself so simple and so grand—that the great masses of the planets were[Pg 38] suspended in empty space, and retained in their orbits by an invisible influence residing in the sun—was to the ignorant a thing inconceivable, and to the learned a revival of the occult qualities of the ancient physics. This remark applies particularly to the continent. Leibnitz misapprehended; Huygens in part rejected; John Bernoulli opposed; and Fontenelle never received the doctrines of the PRINCIPIA. So that, the saying of Voltaire is probably true, that though Newton survived the publication of his great work more than forty years, yet, at the time of his death, he had not above twenty followers out of England. But in England, the reception of our author's philosophy was rapid and triumphant. His own labours, while Lucasian Professor; those of his successors in that Chair—Whiston and Saunderson; those of Dr. Samuel Clarke, Dr. Laughton, Roger Cotes, and Dr. Bentley; the experimental lectures of Dr. Keill and Desaguliers; the early and powerful exertions of David Gregory at Edinburgh, and of his brother James Gregory at St. Andrew's, tended to diffuse widely in England and Scotland a knowledge of, and taste for the truths of the PRINCIPIA. Indeed, its mathematical doctrines constituted, from the first, a regular part of academical instruction; while its physical truths, given to the public in popular lectures, illustrated by experiments, had, before the lapse of twenty years, become familiar to, and adopted by the general mind. Pemberton's popular "View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy" was published, in 1728; and the year afterward, an English translation of the PRINCIPIA, and System of the World, by Andrew Motte. And since that period, the labours of Le Seur and Jacquier, of Thorpe, of Jebb, of Wright and others have greatly contributed to display the most hidden treasures of the PRINCIPIA.