"As for Newton himself, all that he had done never seems to have inspired him with any sentiment except that of a deeper sense of the narrow and insignificant range of his discoveries as compared with the whole mighty realm of nature. A little before his death, Dr Pemberton tells us, he observed : "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.""