It has sometimes happened, whether from the harmonious relations to
each other of every department of science, or from rare felicity of
individual genius, that the most extraordinary intellectual versatility
has been manifested by the same person. Although Newton's transcendent
talent did not blaze out in childhood, yet as a boy he discovered great
aptitude for mechanical contrivance. His water-clock, self-moving
vehicle, and mill, were the wonder of the village; the latter propelled
by a living mouse. Sir David Brewster represents the accounts as
differing, whether the mouse was made to advance "by a string attached
to its tail," or by "its unavailing attempts to reach a portion of corn
placed above the wheel." It seems more reasonable to conclude that
the youthful discoverer of the law of gravitation intended by the
combination of these opposite attractions to produce a balanced
movement. It is consoling to the average mediocrity of the race to
perceive in these sportive assays, that the mind of Newton passed
through the stage of boyhood. But emerging from boyhood, what a bound it
made, as from earth to heaven! Hardly commencing bachelor of arts, at
the age of twenty-four, he untwisted the golden and silver threads of
the solar spectrum, simultaneously or soon after conceived the method of
fluxions, and arrived at the elemental idea of universal gravity before
he had passed to his master's degree. Master of Arts indeed! That
degree, if no other, was well bestowed. Universities are unjustly
accused of fixing science in stereotype. That diploma is enough of
itself to redeem the honors of academical parchment from centuries of
learned dullness and scholastic dogmatism.
But the great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul,
to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined
pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to
its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of
science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No
other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions
which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas
of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and
motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required
for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances
from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty
millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a
foot-ball; of starry hosts--suns like our own--numberless as the sands
on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite
spaces, with a velocity compared with which the cannon-ball is a
way-worn, heavy-paced traveler![A]
[Footnote A: Nichol's _Architecture of the Heavens_, p. 160.]