Such knowledge [of contemporary physicists] is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases: abstraction can provide us with knowledge of accidents but not necessary attributes as such. If we find that the search for essences can in fact only take the form of abstraction from individual cases then Aristotle's account of what counts as an explanation in physics is an unrealisable ideal.

Stephen Gaukroger (1978). Explanatory structures: a study of concepts of explanation...