  Newton's eschewing the method of hypotheses produced no controversy at the time. In a manuscript revision of his “Essay on the causes of celestial motions” Leibniz even adopted Newtonian phrasing: “What follows is not based on hypotheses but is deduced from phenomena by the laws of motion” [Aiton, 1972, 132]. A large fraction of those who had read at most small portions of the Principia and depended on others for their knowledge of it most likely saw Newton as having hypothesized inverse-square attraction and hence as in fact following the method of hypotheses. In the years after Newton died, the most celebrated issues receiving concentrated research arose not from how Newton had arrived at universal gravity, but from the claims he had derived from it concerning the figure of the Earth, the vagaries in the motions of Jupiter and Saturn, and the motion of the Moon. The individuals at the center of this research certainly saw these issues as a test of Newton's theory of gravity, but the distinction between taking the theory as a hypothesis and taking it as a provisionally established conclusion was a distinction without much difference for them. Still, it is worth noting that the conclusion Clairaut first drew from the factor of 2 discrepancy in the motion of the lunar apogee was not that Newton's theory of gravity was false, but that the inverse-square needed to be supplemented by a 1/r4 term — a response fully in keeping with Newton's fourth rule of reasoning.