his books advocating the Copernican system in full[1] went through several editions in relatively few years.
In the Colonies, Yale University which had hitherto been using Gassendi's textbook, adopted the Newtonian ideas a few years later, partly through the gift to the university of some books by Sir Isaac himself, and partly through the enthusiasm of two young instructors there, Johnson and Brown, who in 1714-1722 widened the mathematical course by including the new theories.[2] The text they used was by Rohault, a Cartesian, edited by Samuel Clarke with critical notes exposing the fallacies of Cartesianism. This "disguised Newtonian treatise" was used at Yale till 1744. The University of Pennsylvania used this same text book even later.[3]
In 1710 Pope (1688-1744) refers to "our Copernican system,"[4] and Addison (1671-1719) in the Spectator (July 2, 1711) writes this very modern passage:
"But among this set of writers, there are none who more gratify and enlarge the imagination, than the authors of the new philosophy, whether we consider their theories of the earth or heavens, the discoveries they have made by glasses, or any other of their contemplations on nature.… But when we survey the whole earth at once, and the several planets that lie within its neighborhood, we are filled with a pleasing astonishment, to see so many worlds hanging one above another, and sliding around their axles in such an amazing pomp and solemnity. If, after this, we contemplate those wide fields of aether, that reach in height as far as from Saturn to the fixed stars, and run abroad almost to an infinitude, our imagination finds its capacity filled with so immense a prospect, as puts it upon the stretch to comprehend it. But if we yet rise higher, and consider the fixed stars as so many vast oceans of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets, and still discover new firmaments and new lights, that are sunk farther in those unfathomable depths of aether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our telescopes, we are lost in such a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the immensity and magnificence of nature.
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