philosophy upon a rash fiction which takes for granted what they
never can make out? Is there no more to do than to suppose whatever
one pleases in order to elude the most simple and most constant
truths? What authority have they to suppose that all bodies
incessantly move, either sensibly or insensibly? When I see a stone
that appears motionless, how will they prove to me that there is no
atom in that stone but what is actually in motion? Will they ever
impose upon me bare suppositions, without any semblance of truth,
for decisive proofs?


SECT. LXXIX. It is Falsely supposed that Motion is Essential to
Bodies.


However, let us go a step further, and, out of excessive
complaisance, suppose that all the bodies in Nature are actually in
motion. Does it follow from thence that motion is essential to
every particle of matter? Besides, if all bodies have not an equal
degree of motion; if some move sensibly, and more swiftly than
others; if the same body may move sometimes quicker and sometimes
slower; if a body that moves communicates its motion to the
neighbouring body that was at rest, or in such inferior motion that
it was insensible--it must be confessed that a mode or modification
which sometimes increases, and at other times decreases, in bodies
is not essential to them. What is essential to a being is ever the
same in it. Neither the motion that varies in bodies, and which,
after having increased, slackens and decreases to such a degree as
to appear absolutely extinct and annihilated; nor the motion that is
lost, that is communicated, that passes from one body to another as