Early Modern Mathematical Principles and Symmetry Arguments.James Franklin -2017 - In Franklin J. W.,The Idea of Principles in Early Modern Thought Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 16-44.detailsThe leaders of the Scientific Revolution were not Baconian in temperament, in trying to build up theories from data. Their project was that same as in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics: they hoped to find necessary principles that would show why the observations must be as they are. Their use of mathematics to do so expanded the Aristotelian project beyond the qualitative methods used by Aristotle and the scholastics. In many cases they succeeded.