Note 1141 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
The comparison is pointless. Newton knew far more of his end,—of his mission and ultimate destiny,—than of the purpose and fate of comets, and did not know less of his own beginning than of the origin of the heavenly bodies. Man is incapable of conceiving the mode by which a single atom of the universe was called into being, nor can he penetrate to the essence of a single law or particle of matter any better than to the essence of mind. After ver. 38 there is this couplet in the MS.:
Or more of God, or more of man can find, Than this that one is good, and one is blind?
There is a kindred antithesis in the last verse of the Epistle, but the exaggeration of the statement is less strongly marked.