“Hypotheses non fingo.”

I frame no hypotheses.

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 translation: I feign no hypotheses.

As translated by Alexandre Koyré (1956)

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)
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

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British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern c… 1643–1727

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“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)

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