  Three crucial points for a consideration of Du Châtelet's scientific method and her position between pre-modern and modern conceptions of natural philosophy and then science emerge from this discussion of Newtonian attraction. First, the role played by experience of the world is crucial for her. If our experience (in this case, the brute fact that bodies are sometimes at rest) falsifies an hypothesis (namely, that attraction belongs to matter), then the hypothesis must be rejected.  Second, while Du Châtelet accepts the systematic interconnection of the created world as a feature of it, and as a sort of heuristic in our scientific practice, she puts strict limits on the scientist's appeal to a systematic account of phenomena, especially in light of falsifying experience. So, while the universalizing of Newton's theory of attraction to account for a plethora of phenomena would represent a more interconnected physical system, this systematicity must be rejected in light of our experiences of nature. Finally, while it is true that Du Châtelet thinks a full scientific account must try to give the causes of phenomena we experience—whether those be causes in the basic metaphysical tier or causes in the derivative, subvisible physical tier—when scientists are unable to give a causal account without violating the empirical facts of nature, then they ought not to give such an account. So while it is true that Du Châtelet invokes hypotheses in her approach to natural philosophy, and while it is true that in doing so, she departs radically from those who believe that the aim of science is to merely describe (ideally in mathematical terms) the phenomena without appeal to metaphysical systems underlying those phenomena, the particular—indeed, very modern—flavor of her theory of hypotheses puts strict limits on that metaphysics. This underscores the point made at the close of §4 above: there is a connection between metaphysics and physics in Du Châtelet's view, but we are not always able to ascertain that connection, and so, the scientist cannot claim systematic unity in physics when doing so runs roughshod over empirical data or either of her two foundational principles. While still a natural philosopher, she has taken a decisive step toward modern science in her masterwork, Foundations of Physics.