Newton's Conception of Scientific Method

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Abstract
Commenting on the history of scientific thought, Auguste Comte in his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830 ; Premiere lecon) made a risky but perhaps not entirely invalid distinction between what a scientist says he is doing in his theoretical and experimental inquiries, and what he must have been " really " doing in order to make the contributions he does. According to Comte, what all successful scientists have really been doing, in spite of anything they might have said to the contrary in describing their objectives and methods, was acting on the principles of positivist philosophy. The founders of positivism as a conscious philosophy of science were according to Comte, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, but, as his friend J. S. Mill put it in his Auguste Comte and Positivism (2nd ed., London, 1866, p. 7):

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