well as thesc deserve to be
taken into consideration by you; but that I should copiously debate any of
them at present, I presume you will not expect, if you consider the Scope
of these Papers, and the Brevity I have design'd in them, and therefore I
shall at this time only take notice to you in the general of two or three
things that do more peculiarly concern the Treatise you have now in your
hands.
3. And first, though the Embracers of the Several Hypotheses I have been
naming to you, by undertaking each Sect of them to explicate Colours
indefinitely, by the particular Hypotheses they maintain, seem to hold it
forth as the only Needful Theory about that Subject, yet for my part I
doubt whether any one of all these Hypotheses have a right to be admitted
Exclusively to all others, for I think it Probable, that Whiteness and
Blackness may be explicated by Reflection alone without Refraction, as
you'l find endeavour'd in the Discourse you'l meet with e're long Of the
Origine of Whiteness and Blackness, and on the other side, since I have not
found that by any Mixture of White and True Black, (for there is a Blewish
Black which many mistake for a Genuine) there can be a Blew, a Yellow, or a
Red, to name no other Colours, produced, and since we do find that these
Colours may be produc'd in the Glass-prism and other Transparent bodies, by
the help of Refractions, it seems that Refraction is to be taken in into
the Explication of some Colours, to whose Generation they seem to concurr,
either by making a further or other Commixture of Shades with the Refracted
Light, or by some other way not now to be discours'd. And as it seems not
improbable, that in case the Pores of the Air, and other Diaphanous bodies
be every where almost fill'd with such _Globuli_ as the _Cartesians_
suppose, the Various kind of Motion of these _Globuli_, may in many cases
have no small stroak in Varying our Perception of Colour, so without the
Supposition of these _Globuli_, which 'tis not so easie to evince, I think
we may probably enough conceive in general, that the Eye may be Variously
affected, not only by the Entire Beams of Light that fall upon it as they
are such, but by the Order, and by the Degree of Swiftness, and in a word
by the Manner according to which the Particles that compose each Particular
Beam arrive at the Sensory, so that whatever be the Figure of the Little
Corpuscles, of which the Beams of Light consist, not only the Celerity
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