5.1.2.2 Newton

Despite his numerous religious and occult publications, Isaac Newton had little interest in searching for ultimate meaning behind experience. He and several others developed and popularized a mechanistic explanation for how the universe functioned that specifically avoided occult, supernatural, and mystical influences (which made discussions of how the newly discovered gravitational force was propogated rather difficult). Newton found that the new natural laws that he and others (such as Robert Boyle) were discovering had such tremendous explanatory power that looking for other principles that were more fundamental was not necessary nor nearly as interesting. He admitted that hypotheses of these types might have value by providing representations that would help in understanding the relations of things. This reluctance, however, didn’t stop him making the occasional foray into speculation as to the meaning of existence. He expressed this very briefly in his Rules of Philosophizing, which is discussed later.