 Analysis and synthesis so understood constitutes the core of “the experimental method of reasoning” that distinguishes Hume’s enterprise from the alternative approach that Newton (2004: 121) had termed “hypothetical philosophy”. Hume is aware of this distinction and explicitly sides with the experimentalist camp. His methodological pronouncements and commitments situate him in the context of “methodological Newtonianism” characteristic to Scottish moral and natural philosophers, who “dealt with aspects of philosophy for which Newton had not laid down the specific postulates upon which future theories were to be built” (Donovan 1975: 29, see also Demeter 2016).