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powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished by Bayle, [702] as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave up authorship. [703] Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute. [704] On the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a
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theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted that way of thinking; [705] and a selection from Gassendi's ethical writings, translated into English [706] (1699), wrought in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians, Socinians and deists. [707] Each group, further, had inner differences as to free-will [708] and Providence; and the theistic schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other's philosophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his followers had
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making the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things, which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him. [709] Newton's principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of the materialists. [710] John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist. [711] Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz was
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[712] Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton's principles in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton's. [713] As it was he who first suggested [714] the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in space--described by a modern pietist as