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Updated: June 2, 2025
When a lad is designed for the priesthood, he is, as if by a species of intuition, supposed to know more or less of everything astronomy, fluxions, Hebrew, Arabic, and the black art, are subjects upon which he is frequently expected to dilate; and vanity scruples not, under the protection of their ignorance, to lead the erudite youth through what they believe to be the highest regions of imagination, or the profoundest depths of science and philosophy.
Some faine that these should be the Cataracts of heauen, which were all opened at Noes floud. But I thinke them rather to be such fluxions and eruptions as Aristotle in his booke de Mundo saith, to chance in the sea. For speaking of such strange things as are seene often times in the sea, he writeth thus.
Nobody supposes that a man with no ear for music or no mathematical faculty could be compelled on pain of death, however cruelly inflicted, to hum all the themes of Beethoven's symphonies or to complete Newton's work on fluxions. Most men and women can endure the ordinary annoyances and disappointments of life without committing murderous assaults.
It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt. The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion.
And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps of Christianity amongst the political workings of man. Nothing, that the heart of man values, is so secret; nothing is so potent.
Many of the questions both in morals and politics seem to be of the nature of the problems de maximis and minimis in fluxions; in which there is always a point where a certain effect is the greatest, while on either side of this point it gradually diminishes.
For, speaking of such strange things as are often seen in the sea, he writes thus: "Oftentimes also, even in the sea are seen evaporations of fire, and such eruptions and breaking forth of springs, that the mouths of rivers are opened. Whirlpools and fluxions are caused of such other vehement motions, not only in the midst of the sea, but also in creeks and straits.
On the contrary, his passion for learning seemed to increase with the diminution of the time available for its gratification. He studied Italian, Greek, mathematics; Maclaurin's Fluxions served to "unbend his mind"; Smith's Harmonics and Optics and Ferguson's Astronomy were the nightly companions of his pillow. What he read stimulated without satisfying his intellect.
How infinitely is thy puddle-headed, rattleheaded, wrong-headed, round-headed slave indebted to thy super-eminent goodness, that from the luminous path of thy own right-lined rectitude, thou lookest benignly down on an erring wretch, of whom the zig-zag wanderings defy all the powers of calculation, from the simple copulation of units, up to the hidden mysteries of fluxions!
He traveled through Italy, and after living for a short period in England returned to France and devoted his time to literary work. His first efforts were translations of two English works of science Hale's 'Vegetable Statics' and Newton's 'Fluxions'; and he followed these with various studies in the different branches of physical science.
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