"CCII. [T]he philosophy of Democritus is not less different from ours than from the common. ...[I]t may be said that Democritus ...supposed ...corpuscles ...of various figures, sizes, and motions, from the heaping together and mutual concourse of which all sensible bodies arose; and, nevertheless, his mode of philosophizing is commonly rejected by all. ...I reply that the philosophy of Democritus was ...rejected ...because he supposed ...corpuscles ...indivisible, on which ground I also reject it ...second ...because he imagined ...a vacuum about them, which I show to be impossible; thirdly, because he attributed gravity to these bodies, of which I deny ...in so far as a body is considered by itself, because it is a quality that depends on the relations of situation and motion which several bodies bear to each other; and, finally, because he has not explained ...how all things arose from the concourse of corpuscles alone, or, if he gave this explanation with regard to a few of them, his whole reasoning was far from being coherent (or such as would warrant ...extending the same explanation to the whole of nature)."
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Principles of Philosophy
Principles of Philosophy (Latin: Principia philosophiae) is a book by René Descartes. It is basically a synthesis of the Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. The book sets forth the principles of nature—the Laws of Physics—as Descartes viewed them. It set forth the principle that in the absence of external forces, an object's motion will be uniform and in a straight line. Newton borrowed this principle from Descartes and included it in his own Philosophiæ Naturalis Princi
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