to labour with such difficulties, as makes it almost a contradictory
supposition, or a supposition destructive of itself.

"Matter evenly disposed through infinite space," is either created or
eternal; if it was created, it infers a creator; if it was eternal, it
had been from eternity "evenly spread through infinite space;" or it had
been once coalesced in masses, and, afterwards, been diffused. Whatever
state was first must have been from eternity, and what had been from
eternity could not be changed, but by a cause beginning to act, as it
had never acted before, that is, by the voluntary act of some external
power. If matter, infinitely and evenly diffused, was a moment without
coalition, it could never coalesce at all by its own power. If matter
originally tended to coalesce, it could never be evenly diffused through
infinite space. Matter being supposed eternal, there never was a time,
when it could be diffused before its conglobation, or conglobated before
its diffusion.

This sir Isaac seems, by degrees, to have understood; for he says, in
his second letter: "The reason why matter, evenly scattered through a
finite space, would convene in the midst, you conceive the same with me;
but, that there should be a central particle, so accurately placed in
the middle, as to be always equally attracted on all sides, and,
thereby, continue without motion, seems to me a supposition fully as
hard as to make the sharpest needle stand upright upon its point on a
looking-glass. For, if the very mathematical centre of the central
particle be not accurately in the very mathematical centre of the
attractive power of the whole mass, the particle will not be attracted
equally on all sides. And much harder is it to suppose all the
particles, in an infinite space, should be so accurately poised, one
among another, as to stand still in a perfect equilibrium. For I reckon