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Updated: June 7, 2025
When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's Principia. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor.
In the Preface to the first edition of the "Principia," Newton says, "It is ten years since, being in correspondence with M. Leibnitz, and having instructed him that I was in possession of a method of determining tangents and solving questions involving maxima and minima, a method which included irrational expressions, and having concealed it by transposing the letters, he replied to me that he had discovered a similar method, which he communicated, differing from mine only in the terms and signs, as well as in the generation of the quantities."
In other words, he had come to grasp the meaning of the first law of motion. It remained, however, for the great Frenchman Descartes to give precise expression to this law two years after Galileo's death. As Descartes expressed it in his Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, any body once in motion tends to go on in a straight line, at a uniform rate of speed, forever.
We must quickly pass over the broad threshold between modern philosophy and Scholastic philosophy, which is bounded by the year 1450, in which Nicolas of Cusa wrote his chief work, the Idiota, and 1644, when Descartes began the new era with his Principia Philosophiae; and can touch, in passing, only the most important factors.
THE SYNTAXIS OF PTOLEMY. In the midst of such a brilliant constellation of geometers, astronomers, physicists, conspicuously shines forth Ptolemy, the author of the great work, "Syntaxis," "a Treatise on the Mathematical Construction of the Heavens." It maintained its ground for nearly fifteen hundred years, and indeed was only displaced by the immortal "Principia" of Newton.
Professor Moor, when a young man, being too poor to purchase Newton's 'Principia, borrowed the book, and copied the whole of it with his own hand. Many poor students, while labouring daily for their living, have only been able to snatch an atom of knowledge here and there at intervals, as birds do their food in winter time when the fields are covered with snow.
At present he is only known to the public as the editor of the 'Humanitarian Harbinger; but his select circle of friends are well aware that he is devoting his ripened genius to the production of a work called the 'Progressional Principia, which will be in four volumes, and exhaust the whole subject of social science. This immense undertaking is a favorite subject of his ordinary conversation.
If the theories of heat, cohesion, crystallization, and chemical action are destined, as there can be little doubt that they are, to become deductive, the truths which will then be regarded as the principia of those sciences would probably, if now announced, appear quite as novel as the law of gravitation appeared to the contemporaries of Newton; possibly even more so, since Newton’s law, after all, was but an extension of the law of weight—that is, of a generalization familiar from of old, and which already comprehended a not inconsiderable body of natural phenomena.
But, since the publication of the Principia, in 1687, there is probably no analytical success which has raised among astronomers such a feeling of admiration and gratitude as when Adams and Le Verrier showed the inequalities in Uranus's motion to mean that an unknown planet was in a certain place in the heavens, where it was found.
Swedenborg continued to write, and following the "Principia" came "The Animal Kingdom," "The Economy of the Universe," and more vast reaches into the realm of fact and fancy. His books were published at his own expense, and the work was done under his own supervision at Antwerp, Amsterdam, Venice, Vienna, London and Paris.
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