  Newton reveals various interests in Gassendist themes, dating to an early reading in his student days (see the Trinity Notebooks). For one, he adopts the notion that Aristotelian substance and accident fail to define all existents, and (along with Barrow, who likely read Gassendi as well) suggests that absolute space and time represent the fundamental ontological framework into which matter and its phenomena are located. For another, he espouses a form of the mechanical philosophy, albeit one that departs from orthodoxy (as pronounced by Gassendi) in that God plays a significant and sustained role in determining the course of natural phenomena. Here he follows Gassendi's thought most closely in admitting atoms to his ontology, nearly replicating Gassendi's list of atomic properties, proposing that atomic structures yield chemical bonds that account for the structures of larger bodies, and endorsing the Gassendist notion of light as flowing in a stream of atoms (in opposition to the Cartesian wave theory promoted by Hooke and Huygens).  In the spirit of Boyle, though, Newton tends to treat his matter theory as instrumentally useful rather than as a universal hypothesis in search of further instances. In this way he hopes to avoid the hard questions about our ability to summon empirical verification of their existence or precise character. One famous Newtonian methodological dictum indicates there are aspects of atoms we can know, however. In the Principia (1687), Newton suggests a transdictive principle of Gassendist provenance (also embraced by Locke), according to which the basic properties of bodies on the micro-scale (“the least particles of all bodies”) may be inferred from such properties of bodies as we have evidence of, on the macro-scale.