To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.
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"I was born in the year of the comet."
"The causes of gravity are not yet discovered. It is by experiments and observations that we are to know them."
"The parts of all homogeneal hard bodies which fully touch one another, stick together with a very strong attraction."
"It is not the business of philosophy to account for the truth of things by hypotheses, but to deduce them from phenomena."
"Nature is pleased with simplicity."
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Science advances through careful, verifiable steps—not bold guesses. It's better to establish a few things with certainty and pass the unfinished work to future generations than to construct sweeping explanations that rest on shaky ground. Intellectual humility is a feature, not a weakness. One person, one era, cannot know everything. Progress is cumulative, built by many hands across time.
Newton embodied this philosophy—his famous declaration "hypotheses non fingo" (I feign no hypotheses) meant he described gravity's measurable effects mathematically without speculating about its underlying mechanism. He spent decades refining narrow problems in optics, motion, and calculus before publishing, and even then withheld much work for years. His Principia demonstrated laws without claiming to explain why gravity exists—certainty over speculation, exactly as he preached.
The 17th century saw natural philosophers racing to explain all of creation—Descartes built elaborate vortex theories, Leibniz proposed metaphysical systems. Grand speculative frameworks were fashionable. Newton's era also witnessed the rise of the Royal Society, whose motto "Nullius in verba" rejected authority in favor of empirical evidence. Against this backdrop of ambitious system-building, Newton's call for careful, piecemeal certainty was a deliberate and disciplined counterculture.
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