SECT. LXXXII. No Law of Motion has its Foundation in the Essence
of the Body; and most of those Laws are Arbitrary.
Among the laws of motion we must look upon all those as arbitrary
which we cannot account for by the very essence of bodies. We have
already made out that no motion is essential to any body. Wherefore
all those laws which are supposed to be eternal and immutable are,
on the contrary, arbitrary, accidental, and made without cogent
necessity; for there is none of them that can be accounted for by
the essence of bodies.
If there were any law of motion essential to bodies, it would
undoubtedly be that by which bodies of less bulk and less solid are
moved by such as have more bulk and solidity. And yet we have seen
that that very law is not to be accounted for by the essence of
bodies. There is another which might also seem very natural--that,
I mean, by which bodies ever move rather in a direct than a crooked
line, unless their motion be otherwise determined by the meeting of
other bodies. But even this rule has no foundation in the essence
of matter. Motion is so very accidental, and super-added to the
nature of bodies, that we do not find in this nature of bodies any
primitive or immutable law by which they ought to move at all, much
less to move according to certain rules. In the same manner as
bodies might have existed, and yet have never either been in motion
or communicated motion one to another, so they might never have
moved but in a circular line, and this motion might have been as
natural to them as the motion in a direct line.
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