Newton's Philosophy

First published Fri 13 Oct, 2006

Since Isaac Newton never wrote a philosophical treatise such as Spinoza's Ethics or
Descartes's Meditations — although he studied a number of such treatises — his status as
a figure with philosophical views of significance merits comment. Fully understanding
Newton means avoiding anachronistically substituting our conception of philosophy in
the twenty-first century for what the early moderns called “natural philosophy.” To be
sure, the latter includes much that we now call “science,” and yet it clearly includes much
else besides. This remains true despite the fact that Newton's work in the Principia
bequeathed to us a conception of science in which discussions of broad metaphysical
questions play little if any role (cf. Cohen and Smith 2002, 1-4). If we interpret Newton
solely as a “scientist” whose work spawned discussion by canonical philosophical
figures, we run the risk of ignoring his own contributions to the philosophical
conversation in England and the Continent in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century. These contributions, in part, reflected the state of natural philosophy in Newton's
era. We might put this point by considering Kuhn's well-known understanding of the
development of a science: although Newton may have provided physics with its
paradigm, he himself worked largely within its pre-paradigmatic context, and the latter,
according to Kuhn, is typically characterized by extensive epistemological debates and
controversies over the “foundations” or “first principles” of the science (Kuhn 1996, 88).
Newton engaged in “foundational” discussions in his optical work from the 1670s, in the
Principia, in his correspondence with numerous influential figures, and in the now
famous — but only posthumously published — De Gravitatione, an untitled manuscript
now known by its first line (Hall and Hall 1962). Much of this discussion involved
Newton's attempt to loosen what he took to be the pernicious grip of Cartesian notions
within natural philosophy (Stein 2002). Newton's scientific achievement was in part to
have vanquished both Cartesian and Leibnizian physics; in the eighteenth century, and
indeed much of the nineteenth, physics was largely a Newtonian enterprise. But this
achievement also involved an extensive series of foundational debates.

• 1. Newton and Descartes

o 1.1 General issues
o 1.2 Criticisms of Descartes in De Gravitatione
• 2. Newton and Cotes on occult qualities and the nature of matter
o 2.1 Occult qualities
o 2.2 The nature of matter
• 3. Exchange with Bentley
o 3.1 General issues
o 3.2 Action at a distance
• 4. Newton and Leibniz
o 4.1 Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence
o 4.2 Newton and Leibniz on gravity
• 5. “Hypotheses non fingo”
 • Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Newton and Descartes

1.1 General issues

Recent scholarship has emphasized that when Newton published the Principia in 1687,
Cartesianism remained the reigning view in natural philosophy and served as the
backdrop for much ongoing research. We now recognize that Newton intended his
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy specifically to replace Descartes's own
Principles of Philosophy, which was first published in Amsterdam in 1644.[1] As Cotes's
famous and influential preface to the second edition of the Principia indicates, in 1713
the primary competitor to Newton's natural philosophy remained Cartesian in spirit if not
in letter. Despite the astonishing impact that Newton's work had on various fields,
including of course what we would call philosophy proper, it would be anachronistic to
conclude that Newtonianism had replaced its primary competitor, for Cartesianism's
influence did not dissipate until some time after Newton's death in 1727.

1.2 Criticisms of Descartes in De Gravitatione

This background is important for interpreting Newton's famous unpublished manuscript,

De Gravitatione, for in that text, he patiently attempts to refute many of the central
notions in Descartes's Principia Philosophiae. But to begin with, De Gravitatione raises a
number of controversial interpretive issues, including first and foremost the provenance
of the text itself. No consensus has emerged as to the dating of the manuscript — which
remained unpublished until it appeared in 1962 under the editorship of A.R. and Marie
Boas Hall — and there is insufficient evidence for that question to be answered as of
now,[2] but two things remain clear. The text is largely focused on presenting an extended
series of criticisms of Cartesian natural philosophy; and, it is significant for
understanding Newton's thought, not least because it represents his most sustained known
philosophical discussion.

Three aspects of De Gravitatione merit discussion here. The first two involve Newton's
rejection of Cartesian views of space, time and motion, and the third centers on his
rejection of a broadly Cartesian conception of body. To begin with the first point: in
much of De Gravitatione, Newton is apparently concerned to emphasize a series of
problems with Descartes's basic conception of space, time, and motion; some of these
problems, in turn, stem from the fact — at least from Newton's point of view — that
Descartes presents conceptions of space, time and motion that fail to reflect a proper
understanding of the basic principles of physics. This is a particularly pressing matter, of
course, since Descartes should be credited with one of the very first modern formulations
of the principle of inertia, which was obviously central to the later development of
Newtonian mechanics. Since the Stanford Encyclopedia includes an extensive entry on
Newton's view of space, time and motion, suffice it to say here that Newton takes
Descartes's relationalism to fail to account for the proper distinction between true and
merely apparent motion. One of the primary goals of Newton's Principia is to make this
distinction rigorous and clear.

This point about Descartes's relationalism might be considered an internal criticism of

Descartes's system for two reasons. Descartes himself attempts to distinguish between
true — or “proper” [proprie/propre] — motion and motion in a “vulgar” or “ordinary”
sense [vulgarem/commun], and does so in what we might call a relationalist fashion. For
Descartes, whereas motion in the vulgar sense is “the action by which a body travels from
one place to another,” motion in the proper sense is “the transfer of one piece of matter,
or one body, from the vicinity of the other bodies which immediately touch it, and which
we consider to be at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies” (Principles of Philosophy, Part
Two, sections 24-25| Descartes 1644/1982, 53-4). Indeed, in the Scholium to the
Principia, it seems that Descartes's “proper” motion, defined in terms of the relations of
bodies contiguous to a given body, becomes Newton's relative motion. That is, Newton
remarkably refashions Descartes's own distinction between the “ordinary” and the
“proper” definitions of motion by contending that the latter is sufficiently precise for
ordinary affairs, but not for physics. The second reason is this: Newton takes the
fashioning of the distinction between true and merely apparent motion to be one of the
primary goals not just of his physics, but also of Cartesian physics. So in De
Gravitatione, Newton seems to conclude that Cartesian physics fails on its own terms.
(Whether this is a fair assessment, of course, is a separate issue.)

This suggests, in turn, that a reading of De Gravitatione may help to dispel the easily
formed impression that Newton sought, in the Scholium to the Principia, to undermine a
Leibnizian conception of space and time, as Clarke would attempt to do years later in his
correspondence with Leibniz. Although Leibniz later expressed the canonical formulation
of early modern relationalism concerning space and time in his correspondence with
Clarke, and although both Newton and Clarke were skeptical of this view, it is potentially
misleading to read the Principia through the lens provided by the later controversy with
the Leibnizians. Since the scholarly consensus takes De Gravitatione to have been
written before the appearance of the Principia in 1687, Newton's extensive attempt in De
Gravitatione to refute Descartes's broadly relationalist conception of space and time
suggests that the Scholium should be read as providing a replacement for the Cartesian
conception (see Stein 1970). Moreover, it is also unclear whether Newton was familiar
with any of Leibniz's relevant writings when he wrote the Scholium. It may be thought a
measure of Newton's success against his Cartesian predecessors that history records a
debate between the Leibnizians and the Newtonians as influencing every subsequent
discussion of space and time in the eighteenth century, including Kant's discussion in the
Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.

This brings us to the second point mentioned above: Newton's discussion in De

Gravitatione is also related to, and helps to illuminate, the more famous discussion of
space and time in the General Scholium to the Principia. In each of these texts, Newton
apparently transcends the narrow questions concerning space, time and motion raised by
physics’ need to distinguish between true and apparent motion, tackling broader
questions whose origin seems to lie in the seventeenth-century metaphysical tradition. If
one rejects a Cartesian relationalist view, defending in its place some type of
“absolutism” concerning space and time — that is, if one contends that space and time
exist independently of all objects and even of all possible relations among objects —
there arises a pressing question that Descartes himself considered: what is the relation
between God and space and time? Before God created the universe of objects and
relations, did space and time nonetheless exist, and if so, what was God's relation to
them?

In answer to this question, Newton presents a position in the General Scholium that, as
we will see, is greatly illuminated by the more extensive discussion in De Gravitatione.
In a passage in the General Scholium, Newton argues that God is ubiquitous in both
space and time: “He endures always and is present everywhere, and by existing always
and everywhere he constitutes duration and space. Since each and every particle of space
is always, and each and every indivisible moment of duration is everywhere, certainly the
maker and lord of all things will not be never or nowhere” (Newton 1999, 941). On its
own, this is an intriguing and puzzling view, but once we interpret it in the context of De
Gravitatione, we see that it is actually an entailment of a broader conception of space and
time. As we read in a now famous passage from De Gravitatione: “Space is an affection
of a being just as a being. No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in
some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space
that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And
hence it follows that space is an emanative effect of the first existing being, for if any
being whatsoever is posited, space is posited … If ever space had not existed, God at that
time would have been nowhere” (Janiak 2004, 25). So Newton's broader view has
something like the following structure: (i) Spatiality is an affection of every kind of
being; (ii) God exists necessarily, so (iii) there is no time at which God fails to exist; and,
therefore, (iv) space exists, and there is no time at which space fails to exist (Stein 2002;
Janiak 2000, 221-27). Notice that if Newton did not endorse the view that God created
the universe, or if he were generally agnostic, his conception of space indicates that space
would exist just in case any entity exists, for space is said to be an affection of any being
whatever, and not just of a necessary being. That is to say, in De Gravitatione Newton
does not articulate a conception of God's relation to space per se, but rather a conception
of the relation between any entity whatever and space; his understanding of God's
relation to space requires a further step. This episode illustrates how we can achieve a
fuller understanding of Newton's view of space and time by reading De Gravitatione and
the Principia in tandem.

The third aspect of De Gravitatione involves Newton's replacement of the Cartesian view
that extension is the essence of body with the view that the property of impenetrability is
equally crucial to our conception of material bodies. Newton presents this view by
articulating what he takes to be a possible way in which God could create material
bodies, or more precisely, could create entities that would be indistinguishable from
material bodies from our point of view. Intriguingly, impenetrability plays a crucial role
in this account, and Newton presents what we might call a dynamical account of
impenetrability (one popularized in the eighteenth century by Kant and by Boscovich).
From Newton's perspective, God could proceed as follows: identify some finite region of
space — to simplify matters, make it a relatively small region, say the size of a desk, and
make it close to some person — and then “endow” it with the properties of
impenetrability and mobility. That is, God would render the region impenetrable to other
objects, and to light, by endowing it with a repulsive force, and would render the region
mobile in the sense that it could successively occupy distinct regions of space, impacting
on any bodies, or light rays, in those regions. Hence in this account, Newton does not
simply add a primitive quality such as Locke's solidity to the extension of a body; instead,
he conceives impenetrability as involving the action of repulsive force. Finally, in a
clever and crucial twist, Newton adds that the region's mobility would be lawlike; that is,
it would be subject to the laws of motion, and therefore would undergo lawlike transfers
through space. Hence there would be no disruption (for instance) of the laws of optics
when the region of impenetrability reflects light, and no disruption of the laws of motion
(for instance) when the region resists acceleration. In that regard, such regions would be
entirely indistinguishable from ordinary material bodies; indeed, one might wonder
whether they would simply be material bodies. In any case, the differences between this
picture of what material bodies are essentially like, and a Cartesian conception of body,
are clear: whereas Descartes takes the principal features of body — viz., size, shape and
motion — to follow from the essential property of extension, Newton takes both
impenetrability, and the lawlike behavior of bodies, to be essential features of our
conception of body.

In the most general terms, then, De Gravitatione helps to underscore the centrality of
Cartesian natural philosophy for understanding the development of Newton's own
philosophical orientation, and his treatment of many significant questions in published
texts.

2. Newton and Cotes on occult qualities and the nature

of matter
Although Samuel Clarke may be Newton's most famous defender and spokesperson in
the eighteenth century, no understanding of Newtonianism would be complete without a
discussion of the role of Roger Cotes, the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford in
the early eighteenth century and the editor of the second edition of the Principia.
Although Cotes was one of Newton's ablest defenders, his role as what we might call a
Newtonian spokesperson did not prevent him from challenging Newton on occasion, nor
from interpreting the implications of Newton's theory of gravity in a way that may have
been at odds with Newton's preferred interpretation. An important episode in Cotes's
relation to Newton centers on their disagreement concerning the best rebuttal to the
infamous charge — popularized by Leibniz, among others — that Newton, or at least his
physical theory, treats gravity as an occult quality.

2.1 Occult qualities

Regarding the first episode, one should note that although Newton was criticized for
invoking an occult quality, that fact did not prevent Cotes, in his defense of Newton, from
employing this as a term of criticism against other philosophers. For instance, in his
extensive and illuminating preface to the second edition — which consists of a lengthy
polemic against various “Cartesian” views — he writes:

Those who have undertaken the study of natural science can be divided into roughly three
classes. There have been those who have endowed the individual species of things with
specific occult qualities, on which – they have then alleged – the operations of individual
bodies depend in some unknown way. The whole of Scholastic doctrine derived from
Aristotle and the Peripatetics is based on this. Although they affirm that individual effects
arise from the specific natures of bodies, they do not tell us the causes of those natures,
and therefore they tell us nothing. And since they are wholly concerned with the names of
things rather than with the things themselves, they must be regarded as inventors of what
might be called philosophical jargon, rather than as teachers of philosophy (Newton
1999, 385).

This passage from Cotes is apt because it illustrates a common problem with criticisms
that reference occult qualities: the criticism seems so polemical that one often lacks a
clear sense of why the quality in question is said to be occult in the first place.

To try to sharpen this notion up, then, we can treat a quality as occult if it meets three
conditions (let's take these as sufficient, but perhaps not as necessary). First, the quality is
exhaustively characterized by the effects that it generates in one or more other objects.
Second, the quality itself is said to be distinct from the effects it is said to produce. Third,
the quality is said to be distinct from each of — and indeed, from the conjunction of —
the primary qualities that characterize the bearer of the quality. When it is employed as a
term of abuse, as it typically is, two criticisms are typically leveled against a quality
meeting this three-fold definition: (1) that it is unintelligible, or more specifically, that
one cannot have an idea of it, and therefore, according to some, that one cannot have a
thought about it, but can only talk about it; and, (2) that it fails to be explanatory.

One should acknowledge that (2) requires an immediate clarification: it may not be the
case that any quality that meets the three — jointly sufficient — conditions listed above
will fail to explain just any natural phenomenon or sensible effect. Rather, claim (2)
should really be taken to mean: the quality cannot explain the sensible effects through
which it is said to be exhaustively characterized. This of course is said to hold in the
ubiquitous dormative virtue case. Some canonical critics of the Scholastics present claim
(2) without this caveat, which may be unfair.

In his famous and influential preface to the second edition, Cotes attempts to defend
Newton from the then-ubiquitous charge that he treats gravity as occult. In writing his
defense, he can barely conceal his contempt for Newton's critics:

I can hear some people disagreeing with this conclusion and muttering something or
other about occult qualities. They are always prattling on and on to the effect that gravity
is something occult, and that occult causes are to be banished completely from
philosophy. But it is easy to answer them: occult causes are not those causes whose
existence is very clearly demonstrated by observations, but only those whose existence is
occult, imagined, and not yet proved. Therefore gravity is not an occult cause of celestial
motions, since it has been shown from phenomena that this force really exists. Rather,
occult causes are the refuge of those who assign the governing of these motions to some
sort of vortices of a certain matter utterly fictitious and completely imperceptible to the
senses (Newton 1999, 392).

So from Cotes's point of view, gravity itself is not occult, only its cause is; and, according
to Cotes, this is compatible with contending that gravity itself is a cause of phenomena.
This indicates, first of all, an ambiguity in the term occult, for the term can apparently
mean one of two things. In what we can call its non-technical sense — where one needn’t
meet the three-fold definition above — saying that the cause of gravity is occult means
simply that the cause is hidden or unknown. But in the technical sense above, the claim
means that the cause of gravity is an unintelligible power of bodies.

If Cotes has the ordinary, rather than the technical, meaning in mind, then gravity's cause
is something that we could, as far as his discussion is concerned, hope to discover, even if
we do not yet know it in 1713. And it seems as clear as anything that in each edition of
the Principia, Newton thinks that it is perfectly reasonable to search for a cause of
gravity, which is to say, at the least, he certainly thinks that gravity does have some cause
(Newton 1999, 943). If Cotes has the technical sense in mind, however, then gravity's
cause is obviously not something that we could hope to discover, not because it is hidden
or microscopic, but because it is not intelligible and therefore not the sort of thing that
could be discovered. That is to say, if the cause of gravity is occult in the technical sense,
then the proper response is presumably that we ought to reject this very idea, rather than
to endorse a search for something answering to it. So Cotes's claim appears to be twofold:
first, it is incorrect to contend that gravity itself is an occult quality — on the contrary, it
is perfectly evident; and second, it is incorrect to contend that gravity's cause is an occult
quality, if by that we mean more than the claim that gravity's cause is unknown.

2.2 The nature of matter

But what does it mean to claim that gravity is evident? Cotes intends specifically that we
should add gravity to the usual list of primary qualities. Of course, conceptions of the
primary qualities differ, but for our purposes here, we might take such qualities to
characterize all macroscopic bodies, along with all of their microscopic parts; there is a
broad consensus in this period that certain qualities do in fact characterize all material
bodies (and their parts), but considerable disagreement concerning the proper list of such
qualities. Cotes writes:

The extension, mobility, and impenetrability of bodies are known only through
experiments; it is in exactly the same way that the gravity of bodies is known…Thus all
bodies for which we have observations are heavy; and from this we conclude that all
bodies universally are heavy, even those for which we do not have observations…
Among the primary qualities of all bodies universally, either gravity will have a place, or
extension, mobility, and impenetrability will not (Newton 1999, 392).

It is quite natural for Cotes to make this point, for Newton himself employs the third of
his Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy, to which Cotes here alludes, to prove that
gravity acts “universally” (Newton 1999, 795-96). In every other case, Rule Three is
employed to show how we can justifiably infer that some quality found within the reach
of our experiments is, given certain background conditions, a quality of all bodies
universally. And so Cotes contends that gravity, too, is a quality of all bodies universally,
and thereby attempts to block two criticisms: one, that gravity is a quality of bodies, but
not of all bodies universally (that is a claim about the inference we can make from our
empirical evidence); and two, that gravity must be considered an occult quality if it is a
universal quality, a view he rebuts in the paragraph quoted above, which in fact follows
the paragraph just quoted.

However, Cotes and Newton appear to differ on this crucial point. For his part, Newton
denies that gravity is an occult quality not by insisting that we have sufficient evidence to
consider it a “primary quality” of bodies, but by contending that it is not an “essential”
quality. So Newton appears to shift the discussion from considering which properties are
universal — or “primary” — to considering which are “essential” to material bodies.
After reviewing the relevant empirical evidence in Book Three of the Principia, Newton
concludes the discussion of Rule Three as follows: “it will have to be concluded by this
third rule that all bodies gravitate toward one another” (Newton 1999, 796). If by that
Newton means that gravity is a universal quality of bodies, he might be interpreted as
agreeing with Cotes. But he then inserts a significant caveat: “Yet I am by no means
affirming that gravity is essential to bodies. By inherent force I mean only the force of
inertia. This is immutable. Gravity is diminished as bodies recede from the earth” (ibid.).
This passage repeats a claim in one of Newton's letters to Richard Bentley from many
years earlier, namely the denial that gravity is “essential” to matter (cf. the section on
Bentley). He presents the denial, reasonably enough, on the grounds that the gravitational
interaction between any two massive bodies is a function of their distance, so if their
distance is increased, the strength of their interaction is diminished. The interaction, and
therefore the (supposed) property, would seem to disappear entirely in the case of a
lonely body. The implication seems to be as follows: since gravity fails to meet what is
sometimes called the “lonely corpuscle” criterion, it cannot be an essential quality of
bodies. A lonely body would lack gravitational interactions.

Gravity does not meet the “lonely corpuscle” criterion, but since Newton contends that all
bodies gravitate toward one another, it may seem that gravity is a type of ubiquitous
relational property, one that is instantiated when two or more bodies with mass exist in
the same world. Perhaps this indicates that it is actually akin to a secondary quality,
rather than to a primary quality, as Cotes alleges. The fact that, from Newton's point of
view, this reading appears to fail might be illuminating here. Gravity conforms to the
third law of motion, so if X and Y are two massive bodies, we should not infer that we can
simply attribute to X a “power” to attract Y, or to Y a “power” to attract X. Rather, for X to
be attracted to Y is precisely for Y to be attracted to X (and vice versa). To be any kind of
quality of either body in the interaction, it must be a quality of both, and a quality of
precisely the same type. Gravity therefore seems to lack what we might call the
asymmetric character of ordinary secondary qualities, such as colors. These qualities
seem to involve asymmetric interactions because they are said to dispose objects to
appear a certain way to us, or to cause certain ideas in perceivers; gravity presumably
cannot be fully understood on these models.

The question of whether gravity can be considered a type of quality can also be
illuminated, from Newton's point of view, by contrasting it with the case of mass. Since
Newton employs force of inertia as another name for (inertial) mass — it is a potentially
misleading name, but we can bracket that here — the passage from the Principia above
invites us to consider Newton's distinct treatment of mass and of gravity. Since mass
cannot be diminished by a body's spatiotemporal position (unlike gravity), and since it
remains a property even of a lonely corpuscle, Newton distinguishes it from gravity,
taking it to be an essential quality of all material bodies. Thus if the theory in the
Principia uncovers a new essential quality of material bodies, according to Newton, mass
is actually the quality, rather than gravity. This indicates that although gravity is not
essential to matter, what we might call the basis for gravitational interactions, namely
mass, is in fact essential to material bodies. This highlights a subtlety in Newton's view
often missed by his critics.

In contending that inertial mass is — whereas gravity is not — to be considered an

essential property of matter, and in listing inertial mass alongside extension,
impenetrability and other ordinary “primary” qualities, we might read Newton as aligning
himself with a broader tradition identified by Margaret Wilson. She helpfully
distinguishes the view that the primary qualities must be accessible to ordinary perceptual
experience from the view that the qualities ought to be defined by the latest scientific
theory, regardless of our perceptual access to them (Wilson 1999, 455-94). Whereas
some of the “mechanists” defended the first view, Newton appears to be allied with the
second tradition. The inertial mass of a given body does not appear to be directly
perceptible in ordinary experience, and it does not appear to be perceptible through the
perception of other primary qualities, such as extension, or of other properties, such as
weight. And even if one thinks that inertial mass is perceptible in one of these ways, it is
nonetheless distinct from other primary qualities at least in the sense that it is
perceptually unavailable to perceivers who lack an acquaintance with the relevant theory.
It would seem that one cannot perceive inertial mass independently of gaining the
relevant concept from Newton's theory: independently of the theory, one would
presumably not know that in certain cases, one perceives a body's resistance to
acceleration. More generally, then, Newton seems to think that we cannot generate a
comprehensive list of the primary qualities independently of our physical theory
concerning the interactions of bodies. On that point, perhaps Cotes would agree, despite
his disagreements with Newton.

More generally, it should be noted that Cotes's interpretation — according to which

gravity is a universal quality of all bodies, and possibly an essential quality — gained
considerable support as the eighteenth century progressed. For instance, the view that
gravity ought to be understood as essential to matter, even on the basis of evidence
available to Newton himself, was defended at length in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations
of Natural Science (Friedman 1990). In that regard, we might think of Cotes and Kant as
falling into the same post-Newtonian interpretive tradition, one whose proponents took a
step that Newton himself seemed unwilling to take.

3. Exchange with Bentley

3.1 General issues

In addition to his published works and unpublished manuscripts, Newton's

correspondence was extensive. Of course, in Newton's day intellectual correspondence
was not seen solely, or perhaps even primarily, as a private affair between two
individuals. It was viewed in much less constrained terms as a type of text that had an
important public dimension, not least because it served as the primary vehicle of
communication for writers separated by what were then considered to be great distances.
As the thousands of letters sent to and from the Royal Society in Newton's day testify,
natural philosophy would have largely ceased without this means of communicating
ideas, results and questions. It was therefore not at all unusual for letters between famous
writers to be published essentially unedited. For instance, the Leibniz-Clarke
correspondence was published almost immediately after Leibniz's death in 1716 (see
below); Newton's famous 1679 letter to Robert Boyle, in which Newton discusses a
possible “physical” explanation for gravity, was published in 1744 in Thomas Birch's
edition of Boyle's works (Janiak 2004, 1-11); and, Newton's late-seventeenth-century
correspondence with the Reverend Richard Bentley was published in 1756 as Four
Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley concerning Some Arguments in Proof of
a Deity.

When Bentley, a theologian by training, was asked to deliver the Boyle lectures in
London — the lectures were endowed by a bequest in Robert Boyle's will and were
focused on the defense of Christianity against atheism and other scourges — he wrote
Newton a series of letters in the early 1690s requesting assistance in understanding the
Principia. Newton's responses are justly famous not simply because they contain
extensive remarks illuminating his own views, but because they are deliberately written
for a lay reader (unlike the Principia!).

In the broadest terms, Newton's four letters to Bentley indicate the extent to which
Newton took his theory of gravity in the Principia to support certain theologically salient
conceptions of the solar system and its origins. For instance, in the first letter Newton
famously contends that the motions of the planetary bodies around the sun could not have
arisen through a natural cause, but rather must have been established through the
intervention of an “intelligent agent.” Among other reasons, Newton notes that the
planetary orbits could not have been arranged in their “concentric circles” through natural
causes such as gravitational attraction between massive bodies; instead, the orbits would
have been parabolas or very eccentric ellipses. So the arrangement of the solar system
tends to confirm the existence of a deity, in Newton's eyes.
3.2 Action at a distance

In the letters, Newton also responds to certain prominent reactions to the theory of
gravity in the Principia. One of the most vexing issues raised by the theory is obviously
the problem of action at a distance (Hesse 1961), and any interpretation of Newton's own
understanding of this problem must account for his correspondence with Bentley. For
instance, in a letter to Bentley from 1693, we find the following stark rejection of action
at a distance, one that may be Newton's most famous pronouncement on the subject:

It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of

something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual
contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body
may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything
else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another,
is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a
competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it (Janiak 2004, 102).

It appears that if accepting Newton's theory of gravity commits one to accepting action at
a distance, Newton's sense of what counts as an intelligible cause of motion would be
violated by his own theory.

It is crucial, moreover, that Newton connected his understanding of the notion that all
material bodies — or all bodies with mass — bear “gravity” as an essential property with
the question of how to avoid invoking distant action when characterizing gravitational
attraction. Notice that in the passage above, in the course of denying that one material
body can act at a distance on another material body, Newton also denies that gravity is
“innate” or “inherent” in matter, or that it is part of the “essence” of matter (see section
2.2 above), a point Newton had already emphasized in a previous letter to Bentley (Janiak
2004, 100). He apparently thinks that to conceive of gravity as “innate” or “inherent” in
matter is to think of it as due to no other physical process, entity, or medium between
material bodies. Hence the claim about innateness or inherence amounts to the claim that
there is action at a distance. Since Newton takes the latter to be simply unintelligible, it
stands to reason that he rejects the claim concerning its inherence in matter. One way of
avoiding the invocation of distant action, along with the claim about gravity's innateness
or inherence in matter, is to leave open the possibility that gravity is due to an aetherial
medium that acts on, and even penetrates, all matter. The aether's ubiquity throughout
space would presumably ensure its action is only local in character.[3] And Newton
attempts to account for the fact that the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the
square of the distance between any two bodies by proposing that the density of the aether
increases as one's distance from a given body increases. According to this hypothesis, the
aether “impels” bodies to move toward one another; this action appears to earth-bound
observers as that of an attractive force. The connection and import of these claims
remains of continuing scholarly interest.

The postulation of the aether, in turn, raises the question of how to understand Newton's
considered attitude toward hypotheses (see also section 6 below). In the General
Scholium, hypotheses non fingo concerns the postulation of a cause for gravity. It is
sometimes claimed that Newton took any “physical” characterization of gravity — any
characterization of its cause — to involve hypotheses, the very type of assumption
Newton strove so stridently to expunge from physics. However, it seems that Newton
does not rule out causal explanations of gravity because they necessarily involve
hypotheses. Rather, when Newton wrote the General Scholium there was no independent
empirical evidence to support the relevant causal explanations of gravity, so they
remained merely hypothetical. Hence “hypotheses non fingo” might be interpreted to
mean that we have insufficient data to characterize gravity physically; it means neither
that we have grounds for ending the search for such data, nor that attempts to use new
data to produce a physical characterization would involve a sullying of physics by
hypotheses.

4. Newton and Leibniz

From our vantage point, the relation between Leibniz and Newton was marked primarily
by mutual misunderstanding and a fiery debate — concerning the question of priority in
the discovery of the calculus — with little intellectual substance. But the controversy
concerning priority did not seriously flare up until the English Newtonian John Keill
claimed in 1710 that Leibniz had stolen the calculus from Newton, having seen a copy of
Newton's notes during a visit to London in 1672. This controversy, with all its nationalist
undertones and hyperbolic rhetoric, would taint much of the famous correspondence
between Leibniz and Clarke (see below), and would eventually see Newton write and
publish a supposedly anonymous response to a supposedly impartial review of the
calculus affair by a committee convened under the auspices of the Royal Society (the so-
called “Account”). These aspects of the relation between Leibniz and Newton — which
have been exhaustively discussed by Bertoloni Meli (1993) — are obviously crucial for
historical reasons, but they have tended to obscure some of the more intellectually
substantive and philosophically salient aspects of their debates concerning Newton's
Principia and the proper methods of scientific inquiry.

4.1 Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence

Despite the importance of Newton's correspondence with Bentley, it was certainly

overshadowed by the astonishingly influential series of letters that passed between
Leibniz and Samuel Clarke in 1715 and 1716. There are probably several reasons for this,
including the obvious fact that Leibniz was vastly more important for the development of
philosophy in the eighteenth century than Bentley was. In addition, the heated debate on
the Continent and in England regarding the priority in the discovery of the calculus
certainly piqued the interest of many readers of the correspondence. More substantively,
Leibniz and Clarke discuss many crucial philosophical matters — concerning, for
instance, the nature of space and time, God's relation to space and time and to the
universe as a whole, the proper interpretation of the basic principles of metaphysics,
especially the principle of sufficient reason, and so on — that are largely ignored in the
correspondence with Bentley.
There are at least two distinct and overarching ways of approaching Newton's place
within the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. On the one hand, one can investigate
historical sources to determine the extent to which Clarke relied on Newton's
interventions when drafting his responses to Leibniz's letters (which reached him through
the hands of Princess Caroline). On the other, one can consider the extent to which
Clarke's arguments and views in the correspondence appear to reflect Newton's own.

Regarding the first approach, some recent historical work — especially that by Bertoloni
Meli (1999 and 2002) — indicates that we should not consider the fact that there is no
extant correspondence between Clarke and Newton regarding the latter's exchanges with
Leibniz to be decisive: Clarke was Newton's parish priest, and the two were neighbors in
London in the relevant period. In that sense, one would expect them simply to have
chatted together rather than to have written official correspondence.

But perhaps the second approach is more salient here, for even if Clarke had ample
opportunity to discuss Leibniz's criticisms with Newton personally, we are still left with
the question of whether he faithfully represented Newton's views in his responses to
Leibniz's letters. Of course, readers of the correspondence will differ on this question, not
least because they will differ on the proper interpretation of Newton's views! But in an
entry such as this, we can at least indicate some of the relevant issues.

There are some respects in which Newton's views may differ from Clarke's representation
of them. Consider the following two matters. First, in his fifth letter, when discussing (yet
again) the crucial issue of how to understand God's relation to absolute space, Clarke
seems to contend that space can be conceived of as a property of God — a view to which
Leibniz, of course, would strenuously object — and it remains unclear whether this fits
with Newton's published views concerning space in the Scholium and the General
Scholium. As noted above, Newton does contend in the latter text that God is ubiquitous
throughout space, but the notion of a property is obviously a technical one in this
discussion, and it seems to imply more than Newton is willing to allow. Its usage by
Clarke may also conflict with Newton's view in De Gravitatione that space is an affection
of a being just as a being, for Newton denies that space is either a property or a substance,
arguing that it is an affection instead (of course, that text was unknown to Clarke).[4]
Second, Clarke's understanding of whether gravity is a “real” force may differ from
Newton's understanding: whereas Clarke seems consistently to present an instrumentalist
interpretation of gravity, in part in an attempt to avoid Leibniz's charge that gravity is an
occult quality on a Newtonian conception of it, Newton famously contends in the General
Scholium that gravity “really exists” [he writes: “et satis est quod gravitas revera
existat”]; this was published two years before Clarke began corresponding with Leibniz.[5]
Whether this statement is consistent with an instrumentalist construal of gravity à la
Clarke remains to be seen. There are obviously myriad other aspects of the
correspondence that raise similar issues, but these two cases illustrate the difficulties in
taking Clarke to represent Newton's own considered views.

4.2 Newton and Leibniz on gravity

Because of the historical importance of the calculus dispute, and because the
correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke in 1715-1716 was certainly one of the most
influential philosophical exchanges in the eighteenth century, an exchange between
Leibniz and Newton from 1693 has tended to be ignored. Although rather brief, the 1693
exchange is nonetheless quite illuminating, especially because Newton attempts to defend
his treatment of gravity in the face of Leibniz's well-known criticisms. In his letter to
Newton, Leibniz praises the tremendous accomplishment of the Principia; he then
contends, unsurprisingly, that Newton's theory of gravity fails to indicate not only the
cause of gravity, as was later acknowledged by Newton himself in the General Scholium
— which appeared in the second edition of the Principia in 1713 — but also the cause of
the phenomena treated by Newton's theory, especially the planetary orbits. Leibniz of
course argued that the phenomena in question must ultimately be understood as following
from some cause that meets what he took to be the strictures of the mechanical
philosophy. That is, they must follow from the action of bits of matter that transfer
motion only through impact on other bits of matter. Hence Leibniz writes: “You have
made the astonishing discovery that Kepler's Ellipses result simply from the conception
of attraction or gravitation and passage in a planet. And yet I would incline to believe that
all these are caused or regulated by the motion of a fluid medium, on the analogy of
gravity and magnetism as we know it here. Yet this solution would not at all detract from
the value and truth of your discovery” (Janiak 2004, 106-7). Here Leibniz signals his
allegiance to the broadly Cartesian view that fluid vortices maintain the planetary orbits.

To describe Leibniz's point of view in a bit more depth, we might — very briefly —
consider his argument in the Tentamen of 1689, which was written after the publication
of the first edition of the Principia, but before the exchange in question (Leibniz 1849;
Bertoloni Meli 1993). According to Leibniz's argument in this text, it seems that prior to
any empirical research in physics, we know both the nature of motion and the nature of
bodies; these not only constrain any empirical research, they help us to understand (e.g.)
basic astronomical data as being evidence for certain conclusions rather than others. In
particular, the “nature of motion” is expressed by the principle of inertia; that is to say, it
is an aspect of the nature of motion that unimpeded bodies will recede along the tangent
to any curve. It is the “nature of bodies” to be such that the motion of any body can be
altered only by something “contiguous” to that body. Hence it is part of the nature of
bodies that there can be no action at a distance, at least, if that action is to alter the motion
of any body, which might be of a piece with calling it “action” at all. If we begin from the
assumption that the planets follow curvilinear paths around the sun, it follows from the
nature of motion, according to Leibniz, that something must intervene to prevent them
from following the tangents to their orbits, and it follows from the nature of bodies that
whatever alters their motion in this respect must be “contiguous” to the bodies (Leibniz
1849, 148-9; Bertoloni Meli 1993, 128-29).

So if we are to understand the orbital path of a planet, we must know what, physically
speaking, keeps it from following the tangent to that path, which would be its inertial
trajectory. Gravity as Newton understands it in the Principia is not a viable possibility
because there is no indication as to how it could operate through impact and is therefore
not, from Leibniz's perspective, even a candidate for a physical actor. Instead, as Leibniz
contends in his letter to Newton, we ought to attribute the planetary orbit to the motion of
swirling vortices that are contiguous with the planets. In that regard, of course, Leibniz
wants his explanation of the planetary orbits to meet the explanatory strictures of the
mechanical philosophy, as we saw above, and it is those strictures that justify the
inference to a swirling fluid surrounding the planets. Hence Leibniz does not provide
independent empirical evidence to justify the contention that vortices surround the
planets (cf. section 6 below).

The most illuminating aspect of the 1693 exchange is Newton's response to Leibniz's
charge, one unfortunately not taken up by Clarke in his later correspondence with
Leibniz. In his rebuttal to Leibniz, Newton contends that although he has indeed failed to
uncover the cause of gravity, he nonetheless has established that gravity itself is causal.
That is, from Newton's point of view, gravity has been successfully identified as the
cause of the celestial phenomena in question, particularly the planetary orbits (Janiak
2004, 108-9); hence this letter represents Newton's attempt to convince Leibniz that the
theory of gravity in the Principia is sufficient to replace the vortex theory favored in the
Tentamen. Judging from Leibniz's insistent criticism of the Newtonians in his
correspondence with Clarke, one might conclude that Leibniz understood Newton's
rebuttal to involve an endorsement of action at a distance (whether he was right about
that, of course, is a separate issue). That is, Leibniz may have thought that Newton's
rebuttal in this exchange indicated that Newton took gravity itself, independent of any
physical medium, to maintain the planetary orbits.

Another often ignored — and in this case, potential — exchange between Leibniz and
Newton from nearly twenty years later (1712) indicates the extent to which Newton was
willing to maintain his conclusion that the force of gravity itself is the cause of the
phenomena that Leibniz and others attributed to the motion of swirling vortices. In May
of 1712, Leibniz wrote a letter to Hartsoeker that was highly critical of the Newtonians; it
was later published in the Memoirs of Literature, a British journal to which Roger Cotes,
the editor of the Principia's second edition, held a subscription. After Cotes brought
Leibniz's criticisms to Newton's attention — especially the claim that the Principia
renders gravitation a “perpetual miracle” because it does not specify the physical
mechanism underlying it — Newton wrote an intriguing, but only posthumously
published, rebuttal. Here is part of Newton's paraphrase of Leibniz's original letter: “But
he [i.e., Leibniz] goes on and tells us that God could not create Planets that should move
round of themselves without any cause that should prevent their removing through the
tangent. For a miracle at least must keep the Planet in” (Janiak 2004, 117). Newton's
response to this Leibnizian charge is illuminating: “But certainly God could create
planets that should move round of themselves without any other cause than gravity that
should prevent their removing through the tangent. For gravity without a miracle may
keep the planets in (ibid.).” The crux of the retort, then, is that gravity causes the planets
to follow their orbital paths, rather than their inertial trajectories along the tangents to
those orbits. Given the similar pronouncement in the 1693 correspondence, Newton
apparently held this conception of gravity throughout much of his life. Any interpretation
of Newton's understanding of gravity, and of his considered attitude toward action at a
distance, that ignores this exchange does so at its peril.[6]
By the time Newton wrote his “Account” of the Royal Society report concerning the
calculus affair, the controversy between Newton and Leibniz had created a significant rift
between their followers in England and on the Continent. Not surprisingly, therefore,
Newton's “Account” is highly polemical and includes many incendiary remarks. But it
also includes several intriguing comparisons between what he takes to be the Newtonian
“experimental philosophy” and the “metaphysicks” promoted by Leibniz. The text
indicates, among other things, that Newton was acquainted not just with Leibniz's
contributions to mathematics and physics, but with at least some of his more narrowly
metaphysical work, including his view of the pre-established harmony. It reworks
familiar themes from the 1693 correspondence with Leibniz, and from Leibniz's
exchange with Clarke, such as their differing attitudes toward the mechanical philosophy,
but it also highlights Newton's own conception of the important philosophical elements
of the Principia and of the Opticks through extensive quotation from those texts. Most
importantly, it indicates Newton's willingness to charge Leibniz with introducing
hypotheses into physics on metaphysical grounds; this is discussed in the next section.

5. “Hypotheses non fingo”

One of the recurring themes in Newton's discussions of his predecessors’ and
interlocutors’ strategies in natural philosophy — especially those of Descartes and
Leibniz — is the question of the proper role of “hypotheses” in systematic enquiries into
nature (see Cohen 1966). Indeed, one of Newton's most famous pronouncements in the
Principia is: hypotheses non fingo, that is, “I feign no hypotheses.”[7] This phrase, which
was added to the second edition of the text, is sometimes taken to mean that Newton
eschews all hypothetical reasoning in natural philosophy. It may be more accurate to say
that Newton does not systematically avoid hypotheses; rather, he believes that within the
boundaries of experimental philosophy — the Principia and the Opticks (excepting the
queries) can be considered works in this area — one may not hypothesize, but it is not
improper to propose hypotheses to prod future experimental research. Such hypothetical
speculations are either reserved for the queries to the Opticks, or are more or less
explicitly labeled as such in the optics papers from the 1670s and in the Principia. For
instance, in the Scholium to Proposition 96 of Book I of the Principia, Newton discusses
hypotheses concerning light rays. Similarly, in query 21 of the Opticks, he suggests that
there might be an aether whose differential density accounts for the gravitational force
between bodies, as noted above.

Why, then, is a given proposition characterized as a hypothesis, and how does this
illuminate Newton's attitude toward Leibniz? The case of the postulated aether in query
21 indicates a potential answer, for the most salient fact about the aether is that Newton
lacks independent experimental evidence indicating its existence. This coheres with
Cotes's rejection, in his preface to the Principia's second edition, of the common
hypothesis that planetary motion can be explained via vortices on the grounds that their
existence does not enjoy independent empirical confirmation (Newton 1999, 393). So it
seems reasonable to conclude that hypotheses make essential reference to entities whose
existence lacks independent empirical support. With such support, one's explanation
would successfully shake off the mantel of “hypothesis.” Newton's contention, then, is
that both Descartes and Leibniz proceed in a “hypothetical” manner by attempting to
explain phenomena through invoking the existence of entities for which there is no
independent empirical evidence. This may fit an important aspect of Leibniz's procedure
in the Tentamen, which was briefly discussed above. For instance, in an attempt to
account for the motions of the planetary bodies in that text, Leibniz introduces ex
hypothesi the premise that a fluid surrounds, and is contiguous to, the various planetary
bodies, and then argues that this fluid must be in motion (Leibniz 1849, 149; Bertoloni
Meli 1993, 128-29). That is to say, as far as Leibniz's understanding of the planetary
orbits is concerned, there is no independent empirical evidence indicating the existence of
the fluid in question.

Newton's attitude toward hypotheses is connected in another way to his skepticism

concerning Cartesian and Leibnizian natural philosophy. In the General Scholium, he
contends: “For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis;
and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or
mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy” (Newton 1999, 943). It therefore
appears that hypotheses may be generated from various sorts of metaphysical principle or
view, and so the exclusion of hypotheses may also represent a way of distinguishing
“experimental philosophy” from metaphysics. Indeed, one of Newton's primary
complaints against both the Cartesians and Leibniz seems to be that they mix
metaphysical with experimental concerns — that they infuse metaphysical views, which
he thinks are always questionable and highly disputable, into their experimental
philosophy, thereby preventing the latter from proceeding on a secure empirical footing.
His discussion of hypotheses is one of several ways in which Newton raises this concern
about his predecessors’ methods.

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