 The way to make sense of Hume’s remarks in The History of England is that they reveal that he implicitly accepts the Mechanists’ insistence—explicitly associated with Boyle—that theirs was the only program that offered the possibility of intelligible explanation (even if in the hands of many of its practitioners it only offered hope of post-facto rational reconstruction; see also Hume on Causation in  section 4.4).  Hume’s treatment of Boyle reveals that he thought it was a good thing Newton falsified the mechanical philosophy. Hume acknowledges that the mechanical philosophy could offer some successful explanations. But he emphasizes that its practitioners were likely to overestimate—on psychological and methodological grounds—its potential. Hume appears to have assimilated Newton’s devastating criticisms of the mechanical philosophy.