From the preface to Elementary Principles in Statististical Mechanics (1902), p. ix.
The Rediff Interview/R Venkataraman
“I frame no hypotheses.”
Hypotheses non fingo.
A famous statement in the "General Scholium" of the third edition, indicating his belief that the law of universal gravitation was a fundamental empirical law, and that he proposed no hypotheses on how gravity could propagate.
Variant: I feign no hypotheses. / As translated by Alexandre Koyré (1956)
Source: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Context: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.
As translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999)
Quote from 'The History of Landscape Painting,' fourth lecture, Royal Institution (16 June 1836), from John Constable's Discourses, ed. R.B. Beckett, (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1970), p. 69.
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)
Source: "Relevance of laboratory experiments to testing resource allocation theory," 1980, p. 346.
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
The Rediff Interview/R Venkataraman
Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43
Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Query 28 : Are not all Hypotheses erroneous in which Light is supposed to consist of Pression or Motion propagated through a fluid medium?
Opticks (1704)
Context: To make way for the regular and lasting Motions of the Planets and Comets, it's necessary to empty the Heavens of all Matter, except perhaps some very thin Vapours, Steams or Effluvia, arising from the Atmospheres of the Earth, Planets and Comets, and from such an exceedingly rare Æthereal Medium … A dense Fluid can be of no use for explaining the Phænomena of Nature, the Motions of the Planets and Comets being better explain'd without it. It serves only to disturb and retard the Motions of those great Bodies, and make the frame of Nature languish: And in the Pores of Bodies, it serves only to stop the vibrating Motions of their Parts, wherein their Heat and Activity consists. And as it is of no use, and hinders the Operations of Nature, and makes her languish, so there is no evidence for its Existence, and therefore it ought to be rejected. And if it be rejected, the Hypotheses that Light consists in Pression or Motion propagated through such a Medium, are rejected with it.
And for rejecting such a Medium, we have the authority of those the oldest and most celebrated philosophers of ancient Greece and Phoenicia, who made a vacuum and atoms and the gravity of atoms the first principles of their philosophy, tacitly attributing Gravity to some other Cause than dense Matter. Later Philosophers banish the Consideration of such a Cause out of natural Philosophy, feigning Hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically, and referring other Causes to Metaphysicks: Whereas the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical.
