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(Hence too every miracle requires a second miracle, the mira- culum restitutionis, by which the hand of the clock, which has been moved forward, is put back again to its place. ) The order of nature, or the laws of the physical world, accordingly coincide exactly with the laws of motion, which no one has formulated better than Huygens did. The component parts of the visible world, which are already associated together, are called bodies. Only the elements of these, the absolutely simple sorts of existence, are substances ; the aggregates present to us the appearance of substances, only because we cannot distinguish between the large number of substances that go to compose them. The latter are therefore phenomena substantiata, to which our confused perception attributes the character of substance. prev next |