Now it appears to me that this assurance cannot be obtained, when the cause assumed in the hypothesis is an unknown cause, imagined solely to account for _a_. When we are only seeking to determine the precise law of a cause already ascertained, or to distinguish the particular agent which is in fact the cause, among several agents of the same kind, one or other of which it is already known to be, we may then obtain the negative instance. An inquiry, which of the bodies of the solar system causes by its attraction some particular irregularity in the orbit or periodic time of some satellite or comet, would be a case of the second description. Newton's was a case of the first. If it had not been previously known that the planets were hindered from moving in straight lines by some force tending towards the interior of their orbit, though the exact direction was doubtful; or if it had not been known that the force increased in some proportion or other as the distance diminished, and diminished as it increased; Newton's argument would not have proved his conclusion. These facts, however, being already certain, the range of admissible suppositions was limited to the various possible directions of a line, and the various possible numerical relations between the variations of the distance, and the variations of the attractive force: now among these it was easily shown that different suppositions could not lead to identical consequences. Accordingly, Newton could not have performed his second great scientific operation, that of identifying terrestrial gravity with the central force of the solar system, by the same hypothetical method. When the law of the moon's attraction had been proved from the data of the moon itself, then on finding the same law to accord with the phenomena of terrestrial gravity, he was warranted in adopting it as the law of those phenomena likewise; but it would not have been allowable for him, without any lunar data, to assume that the moon was attracted towards the earth with a force as the inverse square of the distance, merely because that ratio would enable him to account for terrestrial gravity: for it would have been impossible for him to prove that the observed law of the fall of heavy bodies to the earth could not result from any force, save one extending to the moon, and proportional to the inverse square.