Thomas Reid and the Newtonian turn of British methodological thought

pp. 86-110

in: Larry Laudan, Science and hypothesis, Berlin, Springer, 1981

Abstract

In a famous passage in the preface to his Treatise, Hume expressed the fervent hope that he could do for moral philosophy what Newton had done for natural philosophy.¹ In 18th-century ethics, literature, political theory, theology, and of course, natural science, similar sentiments were expressed openly and frequently.² Newton's Principia seemed to have established, almost overnight, new standards for rigor of thought, clarity of intuition, economy of expression and, above all, for the certainty of its conclusions. At long last, natural philosophy, which had hitherto been open to such controversy and speculation, was established on a secure foundation. It was tempting to believe that conjecture had given way to demonstration and that an infallible system, based on rigorous inductions from experimental evidence, had finally been devised.³ Outside of the natural sciences, where Newton's real achievements were obscured by what scientific non-initiates took them to be, the enthusiasm for Newton reached an even higher pitch. Newton's great contribution, it was said, was not so much his cosmological synthesis per se, but rather the formulation of a new conception of science and its methods. Newton was seen as the harbinger of an inductive, experimental learning which proceeded by a gradual ascent from the particulars of observation to general laws which were true and virtually incorrigible. What Bacon had prophesied in the way of an inductive interpretation of nature, Newton had brought to fruition.