THE EDITOR’S PREFACE

SECOND EDITION.

Kind reader, we present to you a new and long-desired edition of Newton’s philosophy, now greatly corrected and enlarged. What is chiefly contained in this most famous work, you may understand from the added indexes; as for what has been added or changed, the author’s own preface will mostly inform you. It remains for some things to be added regarding the method of this philosophy.

Those who have undertaken the study of physics original: "physicam"; in this period, "physics" or "natural philosophy" referred to the general study of nature and the physical world. can be grouped into roughly three classes. For there have been those who attributed specific and occult occult: from the Latin 'occultus' meaning hidden; refers to properties that were claimed to exist but could not be observed or explained by mechanical laws qualities to each kind of thing, upon which they claimed the operations of individual bodies depended in some unknown way. In this lies the essence of the Scholastic doctrine Scholastic doctrine: the system of philosophy and theology taught in medieval European universities, largely based on the works of Aristotle, derived from Aristotle and the Peripatetics Peripatetics: the followers of Aristotle, named after the covered walkways (peripatoi) of the Lyceum where they met. They assert that every effect arises from the particular natures of bodies; but they do not teach where those natures come from, and therefore they teach nothing. Since they are entirely concerned with the names of things rather than the things themselves, they should be considered to have invented a certain philosophical jargon, but not to have handed down a philosophy.

Others, therefore, hoped to achieve the praise of better diligence by rejecting this useless jumble of words. They established that all matter is homogeneous homogeneous: uniform in substance; the idea that all matter is essentially the same at its most basic level, and that all the variety of forms seen in bodies arises from certain very simple and easily understood affections original: "affectionibus"; here referring to the basic properties of particles such as shape, size, and motion. of the component particles. And indeed, a progression is rightly established from simpler things to more complex ones, provided they do not attribute any modes to those primary properties of particles other than those which