Safe Quotes (1)
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Letter to the French Jesuit, Gaston Pardies. Translation from the original Latin, as in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton (1983), 242.
See also: | Assume (2) | Best (2) | Determine (6) | Establish (3) | Experience (57) | Experiment (199) | Explain (3) | Hypothesis (83) | Philosophy (72) | Proceed (2) | Property (11)