1. For a detailed discussion of this approach with a full analysis of a range of texts see Laurens Laudan ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methdoological Thought, 1650–65’, Annals of Science 22 (1966), 81–97. I am grateful to Charles B. Schmitt Laurens Laudan, Gerd Buchdahl and John Yolton for comments on an early draft of this paper. They are in no way responsible for its interpretatin.
2. See Henry More, Divine Dialogues (London, 1668)
3. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678).
4. In his study Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1964), Maurice Mandelbaum has used the term ‘transdiction’ in designating this problem. To conform more with the usage of the terms ‘deduction’ and ‘induction’, I have decided to use the term ‘transduction’, i.e. ‘leading across’. In no way do I wish to imply thereby that the latter is a special type of ‘ inference’; rather, the term is used to designate a problem recognized in seventeenth-century natural philosophy.
5. Sir Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by Benjamin Motte (London, 1729), vol. II, 203. I have altered the Latin of the statement of the rule in the interest of accuracy. The corresponding Latin is in the appendix to this paper. The original is found in Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Cambridge, 1713), 357.