The New Gospel

Were all the planets as swift as Mercury, or as slow as Saturn or his satellites; or were there several velocities otherwise much greater or less than they are, as they might have been, had they arose from any other cause than their gravities; or had the distances from the centers about which they move been greater or less than they are, with the same velocities; or had the quantity of matter in the sun, or in Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, and, by consequence, their gravitating power, had been greater or less that it is; the primary planets could not have revolved about the sun, nor the secondary ones about Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, in concentric circles, as they do, but would have moved in hyperbolas, or parabolas, or in ellipses very eccentric.  To make the system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter of the several bodies of the sun and planets, and the gravitating powers resulting from thence; the several distances of the primary planets from the sun, and the secondary ones from Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth; and the velocities with which these planets could revolve about those quantities of matter in the central bodies; and to compare and adjust all these things together, in so great a variety of bodies, argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.  

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 seashore, 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.