"The Spirit"
The General Scholium ends with a mystifying paragraph about a "certain most subtle Spirit, which prevades and lies hid in all gross bodies." It has been largely interpreted as Newton's view and prospect of electricity, a phenomenon of which little was known about at the time. Newton describes some attributes of this Spirit and concludes:
But these are things that cannot be explained in a few words, nor are we furnished with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws which this electric spirit operates.
Read more about this topic: General Scholium
Famous quotes containing the word spirit:
“Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy—for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals—than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)