 In this vein, the Opticks provides a more appropriate setting for understanding the character of Hume’s experimentalism than the context of the Principia. As Colin Maclaurin put it in his 1748 account of Newton’s discoveries: while the Principia inquires into forces acting between bodies in great distance, the Opticks explores the “hidden parts of nature”, which are not so easily “subjected to analysis” because of the subtlety and minuteness of the agents (Maclaurin 1775: 21). The principles of human nature that Hume endeavours to explore also belong to the hidden parts of nature that can be explored by a method of qualitative analysis and synthesis similar to the one advertised in Query 31. (Landy 2017 offers a consonant reconstruction of Hume’s philosophy of science as aiming at the exploration of hidden processes of the mind.)