Newton did not change his age’s conception of explanation but rather something deeper still—he changed its conception of empirical inquiry. To understand how, let us take a closer look at Newton’s own interpretation of his method, laid out in a postscript to the Principia’s second edition of 1713. There Newton summarizes the fundamental properties of gravitational attraction—that it increases “in proportion to the quantity of solid matter” and decreases in proportion to distance squared—and then continues: I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of
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