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NEWTON, ISAAC (b. Woolsthorpe, England,
25 December 1642; d. London, England, 20 March
1727), mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics,
astronomy, optics, natural philosophy.
pleasantly” said to Samuel Clarke that “He had
broke Leibnitz's Heart with his Reply to him.”
Newton's later London years were marked by
creative scientific efforts. During this time he
published the Opticks, with the two mathematical
tracts, and added new queries for its later editions.
He also produced, with Roger Cotes's aid, a second
edition of the Principia, including the noteworthy
general scholium, and, with assistance from Henry
Pemberton, a third edition. In the last, however,
Newton altered the scholium to lemma 2, book II,
to prevent its being read as if Leibniz were entitled
to a share of credit for the calculus—although Leibniz
had been dead for nearly twelve years.
Newton died on Monday, 20 March 1727,188 at the
age of eighty-five, having been ill with gout and
inflamed lungs for some time. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey.
Newton's Philosophy: The Rules of Philosophizing,
the General Scholium, the Queries of the “Opticks.”
Like others of his day, Newton believed that the
study of natural philosophy would provide evidence
for the existence of God the Creator in the regularities
of the solar system. In the general scholium at the end
of book III of the Principia, he said “it is not to be
conceived that mere mechanical causes could give
birth to so many regular motions,” then concluded
his discussion with observations about God, “to
discourse of whom from phenomena does certainly
belong to Natural Philosophy” (“Experimental Philosophy”
in the second edition). He then went on to point
out that he had “explained the phenomena of the
heavens and of our sea, by the power of Gravity”
but had not yet “assigned the cause of this power,”
alleging that “it is enough that Gravity does really
exist, and act according to the laws which we have
explained” and that its action “abundantly serves to
account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and
of our sea.” The reader was thus to accept the facts of
the Principia, even though Newton had not “been able
to discover the cause of those properties of gravity
from phenomena.” Newton here stated his philosophy,
“Hypotheses non fingo.”189
Clearly, Newton was referring here only to
“feigning” a hypothesis about the cause of gravitation,
and never intended that his statement should be
applied on all levels of scientific discourse, or to all
meanings of the word “hypothesis.” Indeed, in each
of the three editions of the Principia, there is a
“hypothesis” stated in book II. In the second and
third editions there are a “Hypothesis I” and a
“Hypothesis II” in book III. The “phaenomena” at
the beginning of book III, in the second and third
editions, were largely the “hypotheses” of the first
edition. It may be that Newton used these two
designations to imply that these particular statements
concerning planetary motions are not mathematically
true (as he proved), but could be only approximately
“true,” on the level of (or to the limits of) phenomena.
Newton believed that his science was based upon a
philosophy of induction. In the third edition of the
Principia, he introduced rule 4, so that “the argument
of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.”
Here he said that one may look upon the results of
“general induction from phenomena as accurately
or very nearly true,” even though many contrary
hypotheses might be imagined, until such time as the
inductive result may “either be made more accurate
or liable to exceptions” by new phenomena. In rule 3,
in the second and third editions, he stated his
philosophical basis for establishing general properties
of matter by means of phenomena.
Newton's philosophical ideas are even more fully
developed in query 31, the final query of the later
editions of the Opticks, in which he argued for both
the philosophy of induction and the method of analysis
and composition (or synthesis). In both mathematics
and natural philosophy, he said, the “Investigation of
difficult Things by the method of Analysis, ought ever
to precede the Method of Composition.” Such
“Analysis consists in making Experiments and
Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions
from them by Induction, and admitting of no
Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are
taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths.”
In both the Principia and the Opticks, Newton
tried to maintain a distinction among his speculations,
his experimental results (and the inductions based
upon them), and his mathematical derivations from
certain assumed conditions. In the Principia in
particular, he was always careful to separate any
mathematical hypotheses or assumed conditions from
those results that were “derived” in some way from
experiments and observations. Often, too, when he
suggested, as in various scholiums, the applicability
of mathematical or hypothetical conditions to
physical nature, he stated that he had not proved
whether his result really so applies. His treatment of
the motion of small corpuscles, in book I, section 14,
and his static model of a gas composed of mutually
repulsive particles, in book II, proposition 23,
exemplify Newton's use of mathematical models of
physical reality for which he lacked experimental
evidence sufficient for an unequivocal statement.
Perhaps the best expression of Newton's general
philosophy of nature occurs in a letter to Cotes
(28 March 1713), written during the preparation of the
second edition of the Principia, in which he referred