ABSTRACT
The translator of Isaac Newton's Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series wrote in 1740: The Comte de Buffon was, it must be explained, a very fervent Anglophile, and also the translator of Stephen Hales's Vegetable Staticks. The eighteenth century understood that Newton's method while avoiding misleading claims to omniscience offered a pathway to certain, undebatable truths. Modern scholars have not unjustly praised Newton's wealth of physical insight, his wide-ranging speculations about atoms and stars that they find in his manuscripts. John Keill is remembered only as Newton's champion. As Newton's fame had increased enormously in the years since the publication of Optice, it had absorbed and subsumed all that had gone before that was not in conflict with Newtonianism. The mechanical philosophy was Newtonian; mathematical philosophy took its origin from Newton; experimental philosophy was Newtonian also. The Newtonian methodological legacy seems less clear and confident-at least for non-mathematical natural philosophers-than Burtt would have us believe.
