Hypotheses non fingo
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Hypotheses non fingo (Latin for I feign no hypotheses, or I contrive no hypotheses) is a famous phrase used by Isaac Newton in an essay General Scholium which was appended to the second (1713) edition of the Principia.
Here is a recent translation (published 1999) of the passage containing this famous remark:
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. [1]
[edit] See also
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Book: Isaac Newton |
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[edit] References
- ^ Isaac Newton (1726). Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, General Scholium. Third edition, page 943 of I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman's 1999 translation, University of California Press ISBN 0-520-08817-4, 974 pages.
