are little taken notice of, and make no part of the
complex ideas we frame of those animals. Take
the air but for a minute from the greatest part of
living creatures, and they presently lose sense, life,
and motion. This the necessity of breathing has
forced into our knowledge. But how many other
extrinsical and possibly very remote bodies do the
springs of these admirable machines depend on, which
are not vulgarly observed, or so much as thought on;
and how many are there which the severest inquiry
can never discover? The inhabitants of this spot
of the universe, though removed so many millions of
miles from the sun, yet depend so much on the duly
tempered motion of particles coming from or agitated
by it, that were this earth removed but a small part
of the distance out of its present situation, and
placed a little further or nearer that source of heat,
it is more than probable that the greatest part of
the animals in it would immediately perish: since
we find them so often destroyed by an excess or defect
of the sun’s warmth, which an accidental position
in some parts of this our little globe exposes them
to. The qualities observed in a loadstone must
needs have their source far beyond the confines of
that body; and the ravage made often on several sorts
of animals by invisible causes, the certain death
(as we are told) of some of them, by barely passing
the line, or, as it is certain of other, by being removed
into a neighbouring country; evidently show that the
concurrence and operations of several bodies, with
which they are seldom thought to have anything to
do, is absolutely necessary to make them be what they
appear to us, and to preserve those qualities by which
we know and distinguish them. We are then quite
out of the way, when we think that things contain
within themselves the qualities that appear
to us in them; and we in vain search for that constitution
within the body of a fly or an elephant, upon which
depend those qualities and powers we observe in them.
For which, perhaps, to understand them aright, we ought
to look not only beyond this our earth and atmosphere,
but even beyond the sun or remotest star our eyes
have yet discovered. For how much the being and
operation of particular substances in this our globe
depends on causes utterly beyond our view, is impossible
for us to determine. We see and perceive some
of the motions and grosser operations of things here
about us; but whence the streams come that keep all
these curious machines in motion and repair, how conveyed
and modified, is beyond our notice and apprehension:
and the great parts and wheels, as I may so say, of
this stupendous structure of the universe, may, for
aught we know, have such a connexion and dependence
in their influences and operations one upon another,
that perhaps things in this our mansion would put
on quite another face, and cease to be what they are,
if some one of the stars or great bodies incomprehensibly
remote from us, should cease to be or move as it does.


