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from BOOK II - COSMICAL ARRANGEMENTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
We shall now make a few remarks on the general Laws of Motion by which all mechanical effects take place. Are we to consider these as instituted laws? and if so, can we point out any of the reasons which we may suppose to have led to the selection of those laws which really exist?
The observations formerly made concerning the inevitable narrowness and imperfection of our conclusions on such subjects, apply here, even more strongly than in the case of the law of gravitation. We can hardly conceive matter divested of these laws; and we cannot perceive or trace a millionth part of the effects which they produce. We cannot, therefore, expect to go far in pointing out the advantages of these laws such as they now obtain.
It would be easy to show that the fundamental laws of motion, in whatever form we state them, possess a very preeminent simplicity, compared with almost all others, which we might imagine as existing. This simplicity has indeed produced an effect on men's minds which, though delusive, appears to be very natural; several writers have treated these laws as self-evident, and necessarily flowing from the nature of our conceptions. We conceive that this is an erroneous view, and that these laws are known to us to be what they are, by experience only; that they might, so far as we can discern, have been any others.
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