Selected quad for the lemma: earth_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
earth_n	fix_a	motion_n	star_n	2,539	5	9.5176	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A27428	The folly and unreasonableness of atheism demonstrated from the advantage and pleasure of a religious life, the faculties of humane souls, the structure of animate bodies, & the origin and frame of the world : in eight sermons preached at the lecture founded by ... Robert BOyle, Esquire, in the first year MDCXCII / by Richard Bentley ...	Bentley, Richard, 1662-1742.	1699 (1699)	Wing B1931; ESTC R21357	132,610	286

him as the Moon doth about the Earth and Iupiter hath four Satellites which by their Interposition between him and us make some hundreds of Eclipses every year Now the whole Tribe of Astrologers that never dream'd of these Planets have always declared that when Iupiter and Saturn come about again to any given Point they exert consider'd singly by themselves the same Influence as before But 't is now manifest that when either of them return to the same point the Planets about them that must make up an united Influence with them have a different situation in respect of us and each other from what they had the time before and consequently the joint Influence must be perpetually varied and never be reducible to any Rules and Observations Or if the Influences be conveyed hither distinct yet sometimes some of the Little Planets will eclipse the Great one at any given point and by that means intercept and obstruct the Influence I cannot now insist on many other Arguments deducible from the late Improvements of Astronomy and the truth of the Copernican System For if the Earth be not the Centre of the Planetary Motions what must become then of the present Astrology which is wholly adapted to that vulgar Hypothesis And yet nevertheless when they lay under such wretched mistakes for many Myriads of Years if we are willing to believe them they would all along as now appeal to Experience and Event for the confirmation of their Doctrines That 's the invincible Demonstration of the Verity of the Science And indeed as to their Predictions I think our Astrologers may assume to themselves that infallible Oracle of Tiresias O Laertiade quicquid dico aut erit aut non There 's but a true and a false in any telling of Fortune and a man that never hits on the right side cannot be called a bad Guesser but must miss out of design and be notably skilfull at lighting on the wrong And were there not formerly as great pretentions to it from the superstitious Observation of the Entrails of Cows of the flying of Vulturs and the pecking of Chickings Nay the old Augurs and Soothsayers had better reason to profess the Art of Divining than the modern Astrological Atheist for they supposed there were some Daemons that directed the Indications So likewise the Chaldean and Aegyptian Astrologers were much more excusable than He. It was the Religion of their Countries to worship the Stars as we know from unquestionable Authority They believed them Intelligent Beings and no other than very Gods and therefore had some Reason to suspect that they might govern Humane Affairs The Influence of the Stars was in their apprehensions no less than Divine Power But an Atheist that believes the Planets to be dark solid and senseless Bodies like the brute Earth he treads on and the Fixt Stars and the Sun to be inanimate Balls of Fire what Reasons can He advance for the Credit of such Influences He acknowledgeth nothing besides Matter and Motion so that all that he can conceive to be transmitted hither from the Stars must needs be perform'd either by Mechanism or Accident either of which is wholly unaccountable and the latter irreconcileable to any Art or System of Science But if both were allowed the Atheist yet as to any production of Mankind they will be again refuted in my following Discourse I can preserve a due esteem for some great Men of the last Age before the Mechanical Philosophy was revived though they were too much addicted to this nugatory Art When Occult Quality and Sympathy and Antipathy were admitted for satisfactory Explications of things even wise and vertuous Men might swallow down any Opinion that was countenanced by Antiquity But at this time of day when all the general powers and capacities of Matter are so clearly understood he must be very ridiculous himself that doth not deride and explode the antiquated Folly But we may see the miserable Shifts that some men are put to when that which was first founded upon and afterward supported by Idolatry is now become the tottering Sanctuary of Atheism If the Stars be no Deities Astrology is groundless and if the Stars be Deities why is the Astrologer an Atheist He may easily be no Christian and 't is difficult indeed to be both at once because as I have said before Idolatry is at the bottom and by submitting Humane Actions and Inclinations to the Influence of the Stars they destroy the very Essence of Moral Virtue and the Efficacy of Divine Grace and therefore Astrology was justly condemn'd by the Ancient Fathers and Christian Emperours An Astrologer I say may very easily be no Christian he may be an Idolater or a Pagan but I could hardly think Astrology to be compatible with rank Atheism if I could suppose any great gifts of Nature to be in that person who is either an Atheist or an Astrologer But let him be what he will he is not able to do much hurt by his Reasons and Example For Religion it self according to his Principles is derived from the Stars And he owns 't is not any just Exceptions he hath taken against Christianity but 't is his Destiny and Fate 't is Saturn in the Ninth House and not Judgment and Deliberation that made him an Atheist A CONFUTATION OF ATHEISM FROM THE Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies PART II. The Fourth SERMON preached Iune 6. 1692. Acts XVII 27. That they should seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him though he be not far from every one of us for in him we Live and Move and have our Being IN the former part of this Enquiry I have examin'd and refuted two Atheistical Notions opposed to the great Doctrine of the Text That we owe our Living and Being to the power of God The one of the Aristotelian Atheists who to avoid the difficulties of the first production of Mankind without the intervention of Almighty Wisdom and Power will have the Race to have thus continued without beginning by an eternal succession of infinite past Generations which Assertion hath been detected to be mere nonsense and contradictory to it self The other of the Astrological undertakers that would raise Men like Vegetables out of some fat and slimy soil well digested by the kindly heat of the Sun and impregnated with the influence of the Stars upon some remarkable and periodical conjunctions Which opinion hath been vamp'd up of late by Cardan and Cesalpinus and other News-mongers from the Skies a Pretence as groundless and silly as the dreaming Oneirocriticks of Artemidorus and Astrampsychus or the modern Chiromancy and Divinations of Gypsies I proceed now to the two remaining Paradoxes of such Sects of Atheists as laying aside Astrology and the unintelligible Influence of Heavenly Bodies except that which proceeds from their Gravity and Heat and Light do either produce Mankind mechanically and necessarily from certain connexions of Natural Causes or more dully

But then what immense Weight is there above that must overcome the expansive force of the Air and compress it into near the thousandth part of the room that it now takes up We that acknowledge a God Almighty can give an account of one Deluge by saying it was miraculous but it would be strange to see an Atheist have recourse to a Miracle and that not once only but upon infinite occasions But perhaps they may endeavour to prove the possibility of such a natural Deluge by borrowing an ingenious Notion and pretending That the face of Nature may be now quite changed from what it was and that formerly the whole Collection of Waters might be an orbicular Abyss arched over with an exterior Crust or Shell of Earth and that the breaking and fall of this Crust might naturally make a Deluge I 'll allow the Atheist all the fair play in the world Let us suppose the Fall of this imaginary Crust First It seems to be impossible but that all the Inhabitants of this Crust must be dash'd to pieces in its Ruins So that this very Notion brings us to the necessity of a new production of Men to evade which it is introduced by the Atheist Again If such a Crust naturally fell then it had in its own constitution a tendency towards a Fall that is it was more likely and inclinable to fall this thousand years than the last But if the Crust was always gradually nearer and nearer to falling that plainly evinces that it had not endured eternally before its Fall For let them assign any imaginable period for its falling how could it have held out till then according to the supposition the unmeasurable duration of infinite Ages before And again such a Crust could fall but once for what Architect can an Atheist suppose to rebuild a new Arch out of the ruins of the other But I have shewn before that this Atheist hath need of infinite Deluges to effect his design and therefore I 'll leave him to contrive how to make infinite Crusts one upon the back of another and now proceed to examine in the second place The Astrological Explication of the Origin of Men. II. If you ask one of this Party what Evidence he is able to produce for the truth of his Art he may perhaps offer some Physical Reasons for a general influence of the Stars upon terrestrial bodies but as Astrology is consider'd to be a System of Rules and Propositions he will not pretend to give any reason of it à priori but resolves all that into Tradition from the Chaldeans and Aegyptians who first learnt it by long observation and transmitted it down to Posterity and that now it is daily confirmed by Events which are experienced to answer the Predictions This is all that can be said for Astrology as an Art So that the whole Credibility of this Planetary production of Mankind must depend upon Observation But are they able to shew among all the Remains of the Chaldaick Observations for Four hundred and seventy thousand years as they pretended any Tradition of such a Production So far from that that the Chaldeans believed the world and mankind to have been from everlasting which opinion I have refuted before Neither can the Aegyptian Wizards with their long Catalogue of Dynasties and Observations for innumerable Years supply the Atheists with one instance of such a Creation Where are the fragments of Petosiris and Necepso that may countenance this Assertion I believe if they had had any example of men born out of the Soil they would rather have ascribed it to the fruitfull Mud of the Nile as they did the breeding of Frogs and Mice and Monsters than to the efficacy of Stars But with the leave of these Fortune-tellers did the Stars do this feat once only which gave beginning to Humane Race or have they frequently done so and may do it again If frequently why is not this Rule deliver'd in Ptolemee and Albumazar If once only at the beginning then how came it to be discover'd Who were there then in the world to observe the Births of those First Men and calculate their Nativities as they sprawl'd out of Ditches Those Sons of Earth were very wise Children if they themselves knew that the Stars were their Fathers Unless we are to imagine that they understood the Planets and the Zodiack by instinct and fell to drawing Schemes of their own Horoscopes in the same Dust they sprung out of For my part I can have no great veneration for Chaldaick Antiquity when I see they could not discover in so many thousand years that the Moon was an opake Body and received her Light from the Sun But suppose their Observations had been never so accurate it could add no Authority to modern Astrology which is borrowed from the Greeks 'T is well known that Berosus or his Scholars new modelled and adapted the Babylonian Doctrines to the Graecian Mythology The supposed Influences of Aries and Taurus for example have a manifest relation to the Graecian Stories of the Ram that carried Phrixus and the Bull that carried Europa Now which of these is the Copy and which the Original Were the Fables taken from the Influences or the Influences from the Fables the Poetical Fables more ancient than all Records of History or the Astrological Influences that were not known to the Greeks till after Alexander the Great But without question those Fabulous Tales had been many a time told and sung to lull Children asleep before ever Berosus set up his Intelligence Office at Cos. And the same may be said of all the other Constellations First Poetry had filled the Skies with Asterisms and Histories belonging to them and then Astrology devises the feigned Virtues and Influences of each from some property of the Image or Allusion to the Story And the same trifling futility appears in their XII Signs of the Zodiack and their mutual Relations and Aspects Why no more Aspects than diametrically opposite and such as make aequilateral figures Why are the Masculine and Feminine the Fiery and Airy and Watry and Earthly Signs all placed at such regular distances Were the Virtues of the Stars disposed in that order and rank on purpose only to make a pretty Diagram upon Paper But the Atheistical Astrologer is doubly pressed with this absurdity For if there was no Counsel at the making of the world how came the Asterisms of the same nature and energies to be so harmoniously placed at regular intervals And how could all the Stars of one Asterism agree and conspire together to constitute an Universal Why does not every single Star shed a separate influence and have Aspects with other Stars of their own Constellation But what need there many words As if the late Discoveries of the Celestial Bodies had not plainly detected the imposture of Astrology The Planet Saturn is found to have a great Ring that encircles him and five lesser Planets that move about

Chance when there is so many Millions odds against any assignable Experiment 't is in vain to expect it should ever succeed even in endless Duration But though we should concede it to be simply possible that the Matter of Chaos might convene into great Masses like Planets yet it 's absolutely impossible that those Masses should acquire such revolutions about the Sun Let us suppose any one of those Masses to be the Present Earth Now the annual Revolution of the Earth must proceed in this Hypothesis either from the Summ and Result of the several motions of all the Particles that formed the Earth or from a new Impulse from some external Matter after it was formed The former is apparently absurd because the Particles that form'd the round Earth must needs convene from all points and quarters toward the middle and would generally tend toward its Center which would make the whole Compound to rest in a Poise or at least that overplus of Motion which the Particles of one Hemisphere could have above the other would be very small and inconsiderable too feeble and languid to propell so vast and ponderous a Body with that prodigious velocity And secondly 't is impossible that any external Matter should impell that compound Mass after it was formed 'T is manifest that nothing else could impell it unless the Aethereal Matter be supposed to be carried about the Sun like a Vortex or Whirlpool as a Vehicle to convey it and the rest of the Planets But this is refuted from what we have shewn above that those Spaces of the Aether may be reckon'd a mere Void the whole Quantity of their Matter scarce amounting to the weight of a Grain 'T is refuted also from Matter of Fact in the Motion of Comets which as often as they are visible to Us are in the Region of our Planets and there are observed to move some in quite contrary courses to Theirs and some in cross and oblique ones in Planes inclined to the Plane of the Ecliptick in all kinds of Angles which firmly evinces that the Regions of the Aether are empty and free and neither resist nor assist the Revolutions of Planets But moreover there could not possibly arise in the Chaos any Vortices or Whirlpools at all either to form the Globes of the Planets or to revolve them when formed 'T is acknowledged by all that inanimate unactive Matter moves always in a streight Line nor ever reflects in an Angle nor bends in a Circle which is a continual reflexion unless either by some external Impulse that may divert it from the direct motion or by an intrinseck Principle of Gravity or Attraction that may make it describe a curve line about the attracting Body But this latter Cause is not now supposed and the former could never beget Whirlpools in a Chaos of so great a Laxity and Thinness For 't is matter of certain experience and universally allowed that all Bodies moved circularly have a perpetual endeavour to recede from the Center and every moment would fly out in right Lines if they were not violently restrain'd and kept in by contiguous Matter But there is no such restraint in the supposed Chaos no want of empty room there no possibility of effecting one single Revolution in way of a Vortex which necessarily requires if Attraction be not supposed either an absolute Fulness of Matter or a pretty close Constipation and mutual Contact of its Particles And for the same reason 't is evident that the Planets could not continue their Revolutions about the Sun though they could possibly acquire them For to drive and carry the Planets in such Orbs as they now describe that Aethereal Matter must be compact and dense as dense as the very Planets themselves otherwise they would certainly fly out in Spiral Lines to the very circumference of the Vortex But we have often inculcated that the wide Tracts of the Aether may be reputed as a mere extended Void So that there is nothing in this Hypothesis that can retain and bind the Planets in their Orbs for one single moment but they would immediately desert them and the neighbourhood of the Sun and vanish away in Tangents to their several Circles into the Abyss of Mundane Space II. Secondly we affirn that mutual Gravitation or spontaneous Attraction cannot possibly be innate and essential to Matter By Attraction we do not here understand what is improperly though vulgarly called so in the operations of drawing sucking pumping c. which is really Pulsion and Trusion and belongs to that Common Motion which we have already shewn to be insufficient for the formation of a World But we now mean as we have explain'd it before such a power and quality whereby all parcels of Matter would mutually attract or mutually tend and press to all others so that for instance two distant Atoms in vacuo would spontaneously convene together without the impulse of external Bodies Now fiirst we say if our Atheists suppose this power to be inherent and essential to Matter they overthrow their own Hypothesis there could never be a Chaos at all upon these terms but the present form of our System must have continued from all Eternity against their own Supposition and what we have proved in our Last For if they affirm that there might be a Chaos notwithstanding innate Gravity then let them assign any Period though never so remote when the diffused Matter might convene They must confess that before that assigned Period Matter had existed eternally inseparably endued with this principle of Attraction and yet had never attracted nor convened before in that infinite duration which is so monstrous an absurdity as even They will blush to be charged with But some perhaps may imagin that a former System might be dissolved and reduced to a Chaos from which the present System might have its Original as that Former had from another and so on new Systems having grown out of old ones in infinite Vicissitudes from all past eternity But we say that in the Supposition of innate Gravity no System at all could be dissolved For how is it possible that the Matter of solid Masses like Earth and Planets and Stars should fly up from their Centers against its inherent principle of mutual Attraction and diffuse it self in a Chaos This is absurder than the other That only supposed innate Gravity not to be exerted This makes it to be defeated and to act contrary to its own Nature So that upon all accounts this essential power of Gravitation or Attraction is irreconcilable wirh the Atheist's own Doctrine of a Chaos And secondly 't is repugnant to Common Sense and Reason 'T is utterly unconceivable that inanimate brute Matter without the mediation of some Immaterial Being should operate upon and affect other Matter without mutual Contact that distant Bodies should act upon each other through a Vacuum without the intervention of something else by and through which the action may