 To understand this confirmation criterion, it may be helpful to schematize the “jumping together” that occurred in the case of Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Whewell’s exemplary case of consilience. On Whewell’s view, Newton used the form of inference Whewell characterized as “discoverers’ induction” in order to reach his universal gravitation law, the inverse-square law of attraction. Part of this process is portrayed in book III of the Principia, where Newton listed a number of “propositions.” These propositions are empirical laws that are inferred from certain “phenomena” (which are described in the preceding section of book III). The first such proposition or law is that “the forces by which the circumjovial planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to Jupiter’s centre; and are inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those planets from that centre.” The result of another, separate induction from the phenomena of “planetary motion” is that “the forces by which the primary planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to the sun; and are inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those planets from the sun’s centre.” Newton saw that these laws, as well as other results of a number of different inductions, coincided in postulating the existence of an inverse-square attractive force as the cause of various classes of phenomena. According to Whewell, Newton saw that these inductions “leap to the same point;” i.e., to the same law. Newton was then able to bring together inductively (or “colligate”) these laws, and facts of other kinds of events (e.g., the class of events known as “falling bodies”), into a new, more general law, namely the universal gravitation law: “All bodies attract each other with a force of gravity which is inverse as the squares of the distances.” By seeing that an inverse-square attractive force provided a cause for different classes of events—for satellite motion, planetary motion, and falling bodies—Newton was able to perform a more general induction, to his universal law.