Previous to Newton everything was in a sense empirical

The elaborate mechanism devised by Hipparch us and his succe ors was evolved from no underlying principle, but was maintained and kept in motion by the higher powers. With Newton all was referred to one comprehensive law, that of universal gravitation. This principle so abundantly proved its truth, not only by accounting for known phenomena, but by foreshadowing others in advance of observation, that it soon triumphed over all opposition. The further development of the consequences of Newton's great discovery, with its application to the numerous problems of planetary motions and perturbations, fell very largely to the lot of the continental mathematicians; the names of Delambre, Clairant, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, D'Alembert are familiar.