J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

a dialogue with descartes 103
A Dialogue with Descartes:

Newton’s Ontology of True and
Immutable Natures
J. E. McGuire*
my topic is newton’s cartesianism. His account of space’s metaphysical ground-

ing in De Gravitatione (1684) is rooted in a Platonic-Cartesian distinction (or so
I will argue) between uncreated natures and entities which, in virtue of existing,
are exemplifications of these natures (i.e., are natured things). De Gravitatione
is an important treatise in its own right and forms the metaphysical backbone
of the famous Scholium on space and time of the Principia (1686).1 How is this
Platonism squared with Newton’s view that knowledge is sensory-based and war-
ranted by arguing positively from the phenomena without recourse to metaphysi-
cal reasoning? Given his avowed methodological positivism, anything smacking
of Platonism in Newton’s thinking is hardly to be expected. On the other hand,
his epistemic focus is pulled in different directions. Conceived in general terms,
it is an amalgam of Cartesian “Platonism” and Hobbesian “naturalism.” An early
notebook, Certain Philosophical Questions (1664), provides evidence of this tension
which sets a pattern that persists in Newton’s mature thinking.2 Consequently, my
concern will be with Newton’s reaction to Descartes in that notebook, and with his
later critical account of Descartes in De Gravitatione. There he subjects Descartes
to searching scrutiny concerning the notions of extension, body, infinity and
motion.3 So my aim will be to illuminate Newton’s appropriation of Descartes’s
1
An early version of this paper was given at a conference on eternal truths sponsored by the
Calgary Institute for the Humanities. See also J. E. McGuire, “The Fate of the Date: The Theology of
Newton’s Principia Revisited” [“Fate of the Date”], in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution [Scientific Revolu-
tion], ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 271–95.
2
J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook [Certain
Philosophical Questions] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
3
“De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum,” in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton
[Unpublished Papers], ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1962): 90–121.
* J. E. McGuire is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of

Pittsburgh.
Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 1 (2007) 103–125
[103]
104 journal of the history of philosophy 45:1 january 2007
epistemology, especially its role in his own account of spatial infinity. My concern
will also be with how Newton’s appropriated epistemology squares with his view
that positive knowledge is rooted in sense experience.
My larger aim is to show that the received account of Descartes and Newton
regarding the nature of body, space, and extension fails to grasp the metaphysical
differences and similarities between the two thinkers. The received account holds
that Descartes lacks a concept of space as something existing distinct from body.
In contrast, Newton is said to conceive of space as distinct from bodies and as a
condition necessary for the possibility of their existence in virtue of its ontological
priority.4 So far as it goes, the received reading is correct, but it does not go far
enough. The relationship between Descartes and Newton requires a fuller analysis
in order to reveal the deeper ramifications which connect the thinkers.
1. newton’s reading of descartes

I will begin with Newton’s reading of Descartes in Certain Philosophical Questions.
The edition of Descartes’s works Newton used is the 1656 Opera philosophica pub-
lished in Amsterdam by Elzevir. It contains a wide range of Descartes’s writings: the
Meditations, the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, the Philosophical Principles
(Principia), the Discourse on Method, including the Meteorology and the Dioptrics, and
the Treatise on the Passions of the Soul. Newton’s edition is heavily dog-eared and
indicates extensive familiarity with the Meditations and the Principles. He shows
particular interest in topics such as quantity, substance, place, space, motion, the
mind/body distinction, the real and conceptual distinctions, the nature of infinity,
the indefiniteness of extension, the nature of God, and Descartes’s causal argu-
ment for God’s existence. The dog-earing is corroborated by the fact that Newton
discusses these topics (among others) in his Philosophical Questions, and in every
case his references are to the pagination of the 1656 Amsterdam edition.5
He also shows great interest in Descartes’s replies to the First, Second, Fourth,
and Fifth Objections to the Meditations. On the basis of his reading, he reconstructs
Descartes’s appeal to the notion that as much objective reality exists in an idea as
there is formal reality in the object of which it is an idea. In his reconstruction,
Newton echoes Descartes’s account of natures, which Descartes understands in
terms of the notions of formal, objective and eminent reality. He shows an un-
derstanding of Descartes’s treatment of the objective reality or content of an idea
(as it is thought of qua thought of), and of its causal ground in either a formal or
eminent reality taken to exist extra-mentally. Newton also articulates the principle
that, necessarily, there is as much reality or perfection in the cause as there is in
the effect, and he enumerates the causal types that fall under that principle: they
can be an idea, an object external to the mind which possesses a formal nature,
or the nature itself existing eminently in the mind of God. He also articulates
4
For a good general discussion of these issues, see Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing [Much
Ado] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chs. 7–8. For a detailed account of the views of
Descartes and Newton within this general framework, see J. E. McGuire, “Space, Geometrical Objects
and Infinity: Newton and Descartes on Extension,” in my Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics
of Nature [Tradition and Innovation] (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995): 151–89.
5
Certain Philosophical Questions, 128–75.
Descartes’s conception of necessary being, and his argument that the mind has a
positive conception that something is infinite while lacking an adequate compre-
hension of its infinity. That is, he notes Descartes’s distinction between the mind’s
ability to grasp that x is so and so and its inability to have a comprehensive idea
of the complete content of that which is x. For Descartes, our understanding of
God falls under this distinction: the mind can grasp that God is infinite and yet
be unable to comprehend the fullness of divine infinity.6
Newton also reconstructs Descartes’s conception of God as a necessary be-
ing—a being that exists in virtue of possessing a true and immutable nature.7 In
his reconstruction he invokes the Cartesian conception of a nature: “A necessary
being is the cause of itself or its existence after the manner that a mountain is the
cause of a valley, or a triangle the cause that its three angles are equal to two right
ones (which is not from power or excellency, but the peculiarity of their natures).”8
Just as we grasp the concept of a mountain as entailing a valley, so we intuit that
actual existence is included in the nature of necessary being. Here Newton echoes
the distinction Descartes makes between the intellect’s ability to grasp a true and
immutable nature and its ability to generate an arbitrary idea (e.g., the idea of a
golden mountain). Furthermore, Newton shows considerable interest in Descartes’s
Reply to the Fourth Objections of Arnaud. These replies discuss the real distinction,
the distinction between mind and body, and the distinction between dependent
modes of being, such as size and shape, as well as entities whose being is complete
and presupposed by determinates such as size and shape.9
It is clear what Newton drew from his reading of Descartes: an initiation into
a way of thinking that originates in the Platonic and Neo-Platonic traditions. This
tradition embraces a distinction between the claim “there are natures” and the
claim “natured things exist.” For example in Descartes’s thought, the nature—ex-
tension—exists formally in the world of extended things, exists objectively as the
intentional content of finite minds (i.e., exists as the representational content
of an idea of something extended), and exists eminently, or with the highest
perfection, in God’s mind.10 As Descartes articulates these relations, he reflects
6
McGuire and Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions, 128–75. See also Descartes, First Replies, in
Oeuvres de Descartes [AT], ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin,
1973–74), vol. VII, 112–14. Also see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [CSM], ed. and trans. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
vol. II, 81. (For both AT and CSM, citations will be followed by volume and page numbers.)
7
AT VII, 115–20, 150–51; CSM II, 82–85, 106–08.
8
Certain Philosophical Questions, 463–65. The precision of Newton’s understanding of Descartes’s
argument for God’s existence in the Third Meditation is evident from his paraphrase (ibid., 465):
Axiom: It is a contradiction to say, that a thing does not exist whose existence implies no
contradiction, and being supposed to exist must necessarily exist. The reason is that an
immediate cause and effect must be in the same time and therefore the preexistence of a
thing can be no cause of its past existence (also because the after time does not depend on
the former time). It is only from the essence of it that a thing can perpetuate its existence
without extrinsic help, which essence, being sufficient to continue it, must be sufficient to
cause it, being the same reason of both.
9
Certain Philosophical Questions, 128–75.
AT VII, 78–80; CSM II, 54–55; also The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [CSMK], ed. and trans.
10
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 54–55.
an ontological distinction between being a nature and having a nature, and em-
braces the epistemic notion that natures have objective reality or representative
content within finite minds. This Cartesian background outcrops in Newton’s De
Gravitatione. In arguing for the positive infinity of space, Newton mobilizes an
ontology of true, immutable, and eternal natures. He argues that spatial exten-
sion is an uncreated, eternal, and infinite nature which is structured inherently
by the presence of countless three-dimensional figures. As such, it is an object of
the understanding and not of the imagination or the senses. Thus, for Newton, it
is the understanding, not the imagination or the senses, which grasps that spatial
extension is infinite, where for Newton infinity is to be understood as a completed
actuality. What follows is a detailed examination Newton’s conceptual framework
and its relation to Descartes’s thinking.
2. descartes’s true and immutable natures

First, I need to consider Descartes’s conception of true and immutable natures
and the ontological status he accords them. In the Fifth Meditation, en route to
considering which ideas are distinct and which confused, Descartes tells us that
natures exist as the objects of thought. He writes:
I find in me innumerable ideas of certain things, which, even if perhaps they exist
nowhere outside of me, cannot be said to be nothing [dici possunt nihil esse]; and
although they are thought by me in some way at will, they are not made up by me,
but they have their true and immutable natures. So that, for example, I imagine a
triangle, even if perhaps such a figure does not exist and never has existed anywhere
outside my thought, there is, however, a certain determinate nature, or essence, or
form, [of a triangle] which is immutable and eternal, and which has not been made
up by me, and does not depend on my mind.11
Notice that Descartes construes these natures as essences or forms. But, in a letter
to Mersenne of May 27, 1630, he also identifies them with eternal truths created by
God.12 So according to Descartes, even if actual triangles do not exist, the essence
of triangle (as God’s creation) has a distinct mode of existing and is not merely
nothing. Although its mode of existing lacks the ontic status that an ens actu has
in the physical world, nevertheless “its whole essence can be correctly understood
even if it be supposed that in reality there is no such thing.”13 Notice Descartes’s
use of the phrase ‘its whole essence’ to characterize the scope of what is grasped.
This indicates his commitment to the doctrine that essences are indivisible. If the
mind grasps an essence, it represents it all at once without anything being “added
to or taken away from the essence.”14 For Descartes this implies that when the mind
11
AT VII, 64; CSM II, 45.
12
AT I, 152. CSMK, 25.
13
AT III, 433; CSMK, 196.
14
AT VII, 371; CSM II, 255–56. For an important discussion of the confrontation between Descartes
and Gassendi in the Fifth Set of Objections and Replies concerning the concept of essence, see Thomas
M. Lennon, “Pandora: or, Essence and Reference: Gassendi’s Nominalist Objection and Descartes’s
Realist Reply,” in Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies [Descartes and His
Contemporaries], ed. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
159–81. For a detailed account of Gassendi’s nominalist position on the relation between essence and
existence, and his opposition to Descartes’s views, see J. E. McGuire, “Existence, Actuality, and Neces-
sity: Newton on Space and Time” [“Space and Time”], in Tradition and Innovation, 19–25.
grasps an essence, the content it represents refers to the essence as a whole and not
to a part of it; if it is otherwise, then the mind grasps an idea of something other
than that essence. But what is the ontological status of such essences or eternal
truths which God creates? Are they simply innate ideas implanted in our minds
by God? Or do they have a mode of being apart from our minds? And if they are
independent of finite minds, do immutable natures have a mode of being in God’s
mind? In short, is Descartes committed to a form of Neo-Platonism?
These issues vex Cartesian scholarship. Descartes is certainly concerned with
the origin of true and immutable natures. In the quoted passage, he is claiming
that we do not make up the truths of geometry: they are essences which impose
themselves on our minds. On a conceptualist reading of Descartes’s position,
knowledge of geometrical entities and truths is innate and independent of the
mind just because the mind does not invent them. So for the conceptualist, what
Descartes’s claim amounts to is that God establishes these truths in our mind, i.e.,
that the creation of geometrical figures and entities consists entirely in the creation
of minds which possess ideas of them.15 On this view, geometrical notions, and what
they represent, have merely conceptual being in our minds. So construed they lack
any mode of being that is independent of our modes of conceptualizing.
But Descartes says that the idea I possess of a triangle does not refer to nothing.
It refers instead to a “determinate nature” which is “immutable and eternal” and
not invented by my mind. The third Meditation introduces the notion of “objective
being” which Descartes contrasts with “formal being.”16 For example, the “formal
being” of a physical thing is the fact that it exists independently of the mind. ‘Objec-
tive being,’ on the other hand, refers to the capacity ideas possess for representing
their objects, i.e., it refers to the representational content of ideas as they exist in
the mind. For example, the content of a sensory idea of tree, as it is present in an
occurrent act of perception, has “objective” existence in a mind. But the scope of
Descartes representationalism goes beyond the view that intentionality is under-
stood in terms of the mind’s being directed towards things and states of affairs in
the physical world. Intentionality, for Descartes, is an essential mark of what it is
for something to be purely mental. In company with the Medieval tradition, he does
15
For the conceptualist reading see Vere Chappell, “Descartes’s Ontology,” Topoi 16 (1997):
111–27; and Larry Nolan, “The Ontological Status of Cartesian Natures,” Pacific Philosophical Quar-
terly 78 (1997): 169–94. For an important discussion of whether Descartes’s doctrine of immutable
essences commits him to some form of Platonism, see Tad Schmaltz, “Platonism and Descartes’s View
of Immutable Essences” [“Platonism and Immutable Essences”], Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 73
(1991): 129–70. Other worthwhile studies include Emile Brehier, “The Creation of Eternal Truths
in Descartes’s System,” in Descartes: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Willis Doney (New York: Garden
City, Double Day Anchor, 1967), 192–208; and Margaret Osler, “Divine Will and Mathematical Truth:
Gassendi and Descartes on the Status of the Eternal Truths,” in Descartes and His Contemporaries. Also
see Henry Frankfort, “Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths,” E. M Curley, “Descartes and the
Creation of the Eternal Truths,” and Hide Ishiguro, “The Status of Necessity and Impossibility in Des-
cartes,” each of which may be found in Eternal Truths and the Cartesian Circle, ed. Willis Doney (New
York and London: Garland Publishing Company, 1987). The original pagination of the reprinted
articles is used.
16
AT VII, 40; CSM II, 28. For an important discussion of “objective being,” see Norman J. Wells,
“Objective Being in Descartes, Suarez and Caterus,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990): 33–61.
See also Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Caterus’ Objections to God [“Caterus’ Objections”],” in Descartes
and His Contemporaries, 34–43.
not restrict himself to the idea that objects of thought must be about items in the
world. This is the point in his saying that true and immutable natures “although
they exist nowhere outside of me, cannot be said to be nothing.” Such objects are
mental phenomena and have what the Medievals called “intentional inexistence.”
This is the claim that, in an act of cognizing, the mind has existing within itself an
object of thought, namely, the very object being comprehended by the content of
the idea. On this view—one to which Descartes subscribes—immutable natures
exist intentionally in the intellect in the sense that they have an existence (i.e., an
inexistence) or mode of being within the mind. Hence these immutable natures
have an esse intentionale, i.e., an existence as an object of thought. As such, their
ontic status is not fully captured by the claim that intentionality is a property of
the mind’s power to form representational content.17
Moreover, the content of ideas varies: “the ideas which represent substance
. . . amount to more and, so to speak, contain within themselves more objective
being than the ideas which merely represent modes or accidents.” And the idea
of God, innately present to the mind, “has in it more objective being than ideas
that represent finite substances.”18 This means that the objective being of ideas
must have a cause. Insofar as they represent different things, their objective be-
ing differs, so that the “more objective perfection they contain, the more perfect
their cause must be.”19 Although he does not make it explicit in the Fifth Medita-
tion, it seems clear enough that Descartes thinks eternal truths or essences have
“objective being” in the mind to the extent we grasp innate ideas of “true and
immutable natures.”20
In the Sixth Objection, Gassendi criticizes Descartes from a conceptualist
position, claiming that essences or eternal truths exist merely as concepts in our
mind. Descartes replies that God is the efficient and total cause of both essences
and existents and that, contrary to what Gassendi proposes, “we should not sup-
pose that eternal truths depend on the human intellect or other existing things;
they depend on God alone, who, as the supreme legislator, has ordained them
from eternity.”21 This raises the question of the status of their mode of being in
relation to God. Schmaltz argues that eternal truths have their being in God and
17
For an insightful discussion of this issue see John Cottingham, “Intentionality or Phenomenology:
Descartes and the Objects of Thought,” in History of the Mind-Body Problem, ed. Tim Crane and Sarah
Patterson (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 131–47. The term ‘esse intentionale’ is Thomistic
and is distinguished from ‘esse naturale’—the fact of existence in the physical world. For an important
study of Medieval theories of cognition, representation, and intentionality, see Robert Pasnau, Theories of
Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pasnau pays particular
attention to the views of Aquinas and shows how later Medieval thinkers differ from him.
18
AT VII, 40–41; CSM II, 28.
19
AT VIII.1, 11–12; CSM I, 17.
20
In his reply to Caterus (the first objector), Descartes (AT VII, 103; CSM II, 75) says that “ob-
jective being” in the mind “is of course much less perfect than that possessed by things which exist
outside the intellect: but, as I did explain, it is not thereby simply nothing [plane nihil est].” For an
insightful analysis of Caterus’s reasons for criticizing Descartes’s use of the term ‘idea,’ see Armogathe,
“Caterus’ Objections,” 34–43. Armogathe also shows why Descartes’s use of the term ‘objective idea’
aligned him—in the mind of his contemporaries—with the Scotists, an affiliation of which Caterus
was fully aware.
21
AT VII, 435–36; CSM II, 294. Although his conception of efficient cause has roots, directly or
indirectly, in Suarez, the weight and importance Descartes places on the term cannot be over-empha-
are identical with God’s decrees, i.e., that they are acts of Divine will. Rozemond
also advances a Neo-Platonic reading. She argues that eternal truths are the content
of such decrees, and have objective being in God’s mind—a position which she
correctly identifies as originating with Duns Scotus.22
It is not necessary for me to adjudicate these interpretations. Both are right
to interpret Descartes as a Neo-Platonist who believes that eternal truths have a
mode of being in God’s mind. His letters to Mersenne in 1630s make this clear.
He says on May 6, (1) that eternal truths “are all true and possible only because
God knows them as true and possible. They are not known as true by God in any
way which we would imply that they are true independently of him” Again on May
sized. He writes: “If anyone attends to the immeasurable greatness of God he will find it manifestly
clear that there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on him. This applies not just to
everything that subsists, but to all order, every law, and every reason for anything’s being true and
good” (AT VII, 435; CSM II, 293–94). This is why the term ‘total’ in the phrase ‘efficient and total
cause’—as used repeatedly by Descartes—is so important. For example, in answer to Mersenne’s
query (May 27, 1630) about what kind of causation God displays in the act of creating essences,
Descartes replies: “the same as he created all things, that is to say, as their efficient and total cause”
(AT I, 151; CSMK, 25). It is worth noting that in his reply to the Sixth Objections in 1641 (AT VII,
435–36; CSM II, 294–95), Descartes presents a picture of divine causality—understood as a special
sort of efficient causation—which is perfectly attuned to his earlier account of the manner in which
God creates eternal truths in the 1630 letters to Mersenne. In this regard, Vincent Carraud’s study
of Descartes’s conception of efficient cause—Causa Sive Ratio: La Raison de la Cause de Suarez a Leibniz
[Causa Sive Ratio] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002)—is indispensable. Carraud (Causa Sive
Ratio, 225–30) provides an insightful discussion of how Descartes appropriates and expands Suarez’s
doctrine that causality and existence are coextensive notions, namely, that the sheer fact of existing
is interchangeably connected with the co-present effect of being divinely caused. This fundamental,
metaphysical/theological connection underlies Descartes’s commitment in the Meditations and Replies to
the view that causes and their effects are simultaneous—that causing is spoken of appropriately only at
the moment when causes are producing effects—as well as to the conception of God as the complete and
continuing cause of all that is, and all that can be. Carraud’s analysis throws light on the way in which
Descartes understands (in his reply to Gassendi’s objections) the Thomistic phrase cause secundum
esse (cause of being) as opposed to cause secundum fieri (cause of becoming). The notion of a cause
of being, as used by Descartes, pertains to the doctrine that the persistence in being of created things
is identical with God’s continually creating them (in each independent moment of their existence)
by a “continual influx” of creative activity (AT VII, 369; CSM II, 254). In Descartes’s hands, unlike in
Suarez’s, this causal picture is radicalized and applies to mathematical entities, eternal truths, and
objective realities—in short, to every thing (res). For Descartes, privations, such as evil, are not res. See
Carraud, Causa Sive Ratio, 225–26.
22
See Schmaltz, “Platonism and Immutable Essences.” Marleen Rozemond’s “Descartes’s Ontology
of Eternal Truths” will appear in a festschrift for Vere Chappell. Rozemond gives a good account of the
view of Scotus and the Scotists concerning their status in divine knowledge, namely, the conception
that essences have objective being in the mind of God. She argues that a similar view can be ascribed
to Descartes. For Scotus, divine ideas are not distinct from God’s essence in virtue of a distinction of
reason (the position of Aquinas); but they have, in and of themselves, a lesser form of being—an esse
diminutum. For a good discussion of Scotus’ notion of “objective being,” see Timothy Cronin, Objective
Being in Descartes and in Suarez (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1966). For a general discussion of
these issues, see Marilyn McCord Adams, William of Ockham (Bloomington, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1987), vol. II, 1037–63. How ideas are constituted in God’s mind was much disputed by
the scholastics. In contrast to the view that they have an objective being in the divine mind, others
argued that they can be said to have either subjective or formal being. See Armogathe, “Caterus’ Ob-
jections,” 42. Considerations of eternal truth do not, of course, exhaust issues of truth in Descartes. By
the time of the Meditations, we have explicit connections between the “doctrine” of clear and distinct
ideas and Descartes’s rule of truth, i.e., that whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is true and not
false. More work is needed to show how the doctrine of eternal truth relates to the rule of truth and
to Descartes’s notion that truth is conformity to its object.
27, he says that “it is certain that these truths are no more necessarily attached to
his essence than are other created things” (i.e., physical things). These statements
are consistent with the view that Descartes sees these truths as divine ideas that
have objective being in God’s mind, and makes it plausible to say that he accepts
exemplarism, at least implicitly. Again, (2) he says that “we must not say that if God
did not exist nonetheless these truths would be true; for the existence of God is
the first and most eternal of all possible truths and the one from which alone all
others derive.” On May 27, (3) in reply to Mersenne’s query regarding how God
created the eternal truths, Descartes says that
from all eternity he willed and understood them to be, and by that very fact he created
them. Or, if you reserve the word ‘created’ for the existence of things [the reference
is to created natures in the physical world], he established them and made them. For
in God willing, understanding, and creating are one and the same thing without one
being prior to the other even conceptually.23
Given that these attributes are identical in God’s nature, the notion that truths—
eternal or otherwise—could exist apart from Divine comprehension is unintelli-
gible to Descartes. In short, they exist and have their mode of being in the Divine
mind, and to have knowledge of them is a matter separate from the question of
the source of their existence.
This line of reasoning turns on a distinction that Descartes makes between God’s
act in decreeing the existence of eternal truths and his act of imprinting them in
our minds. He says to Mersenne that God establishes eternal truths “just as a king
establishes his laws in his kingdom. And there is not any particular one we could
not comprehend if our spirit brings itself to consider it, and they are all inborn
in our minds, just as a king would impress his laws in the hearts of his subjects if
he had as much power to do so.”24 Clearly, the establishment of laws is different
from their impression in our minds. Whereas God and kings establish laws, God
alone can imprint laws (i.e., truths) in the hearts of his subjects, i.e., bring it about
that eternal truths exist innately in finite minds. In short, the mode of knowledge
of eternal truths—both in respect to God’s mind and finite minds—is an issue
separate from the question of their existence.
Accordingly, eternal truths co-exist with the being of God. Descartes’s position is
uncompromising: God created eternal truths to be eternal, as opposed to eternally
designating a truth to obtain at some time (e.g., eternally establishing that in 49
B.C. Caesar crosses the Rubricon). In his reply to Gassendi’s objections, he makes it
abundantly clear that God made eternal truths to be eternal: “I do not think that the
essences of things, and the mathematical truths which we know concerning them,
are independent of God. Nevertheless I do think they are immutable and eternal,
since the will and decree of God willed and decreed that they should be so.”25 It is
clear, then, that the Meditations conceives eternal natures to be beings per se that
are accessible to the intellect’s power. And, as true and immutable essences, they
have the possibility of being reflected in the essences of created things. In short,
23
AT I, 149–53; CSMK, 16–24.
24
AT I, 152–53; CSMK, 25–26.
25
Descartes conceives immutable natures to be eternal truths existing eternally in
God’s mind, and also to have a mode of innate existence in created minds. He is
committed, in other words, to an ontology of true and immutable natures—enti-
ties which have a determinate mode of being in and of themselves.
In summary, for Descartes, determinate natures or essences are neither a
figment of the imagination nor an invention of the mind. On the contrary, our
awareness of them is located in the clarity and distinctness of our innate ideas. In
the Second Reply, Descartes cites various sorts of natures: the triangle, the square,
the mind, the nature of body, and the nature of God. A triangle’s nature is such
that the fact that its three angles are equal to two right angles can be demonstrated.
This highlights “the fact that its three angles are equal to two right angles is con-
tained in the nature of a triangle,” just as “divisibility is contained in the nature of
a body, or of an extended thing.”26 These are eternal truths and have their source
in God. Given their innate presence in the mind, they are such that “whatever
we perceive to be contained in these natures can be truly affirmed of them.”27
God, of course, is an exception: “the ideas of all other natures contain possible
existence, whereas the idea of God contains not only possible but wholly necessary
existence.”28 In God’s nature alone is it self-evident that possible existence entails
actual existence—a move Descartes relies on in articulating his causal conception
of an ontological argument in the Third Meditation.29
Newton takes over a version of this picture from Descartes. It is important to
characterize this as a version, since Descartes’s ontology of immutable natures can-
not be ascribed straightforwardly to Newton. The problem is this: Newton makes
no appeal to innate ideas which buttress Descartes’s position. Indeed, in Rule V,
drafted as an intended addition to the “Rules of Philosophizing” in Book III of
the Principia (third edition), Newton says: “But I do not sense that any idea may
be innate.”30 For Descartes, not only are ideas of immutable natures innate, but
(in his later thought) so too are ideas of sensible qualities such as pain, color, and
sound.31 In Descartes’s epistemic program, ideas of immutable essences pertain
to universals, whereas objects of experience are particular, and the ideas which
resemble them do not represent the objects according to any relation of direct
correspondence.32 Rather, sensed particulars cause the mind to become aware
of the innate knowledge it already possesses. In Section 6, I consider Newton’s
alternative geometrical strategy for warranting our intuitions of the infinity of
spatial extension. Lastly, although Descartes uses the expression ‘eternal truth’
interchangeably with the term ‘essence,’ a Cartesian essence is devoid of any
Aristotelian characteristics: it is neither a sortal property of existing things, nor
the innate source of any changes naturally appropriate to physical things. Rather,
Cartesian natures have historical roots in the eternal fixity of Platonic forms, in
26
AT VII, 153; CSM II, 115. For a more detailed articulation of this claim, see also AT VII, 116;
CSM II, 83.
27
28
Ibid.
29
AT VII, 45–52; CSM II, 31–36.
30
Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), 272.
31
AT VII.2, 359; CSM I, 304.
32
Ibid.
the Neo-Platonic theory that ideas exist eternally in God’s mind, and (to some
extent) in the theology of Exemplarism.
Newton also inherits an important epistemic principle from Descartes. In
explaining to Clerselier that God is infinite substance, Descartes articulates how
the finite relates to the infinite:
I say that the notion I have of the infinite is in me before that of the finite because,
by the mere fact that I conceive being or that which is, without thinking whether it
is finite or infinite, what I conceive is infinite being; but in order to conceive a finite
being, I have to take away something from this general notion of being, which must
accordingly be there first.33
This mode of reasoning is enshrined in the Meditations, and it plays an important

role in the argument for God’s existence in the Third Meditation.34 This makes it
implausible to think it escaped Newton’s notice. As we will see, Newton applies this
epistemic principle to spatial extension. He argues that knowledge of infinite exten-
sion is prior in the order of knowing to knowledge of finitely extended things.
3. : spatial extension
d e g r av i tat i o n e
and uncreated natures
Betty Jo Dobbs dates the composition of De Gravitatione to 1684.35 I follow her
dating and the consequences it entails. An important consequence is that the
composition of De Gravitatione falls into the period in which Newton composes
the De motu drafts which form the backbone of the first book of the Principia. This
means, as I have argued previously, that its metaphysics and theology provide the
general framework within which the Principia is conceived.36 More important still,
Newton’s arguments against Descartes’s conception of motion (which occupy
the first part of De Gravitatione) inform the Scholium on space and time of the
Principia. So although the Scholium is anti-Cartesian in intent, ironically, many
of its key distinctions (as they are re-conceptualized by Newton in De Gravitatione
and appropriated in the Scholium) have roots in Descartes’s epistemology. Much
has been written about the broad historical context within which Newton’s and
Descartes’s conceptions of space and infinity are situated. Lucretius, Patrizi, Bruno,
Telesio, Campanella, Gassendi, Spinoza, Raphson, and More (et al.) all played an
important role in constituting—during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies—the move from finitist views of place and space to conceptions of infinite
space and the infinite cosmos.37 In what follows, however, my aim is to address
specifically the intimate dialogue which took place between Descartes and Newton
on the nature of extension and infinity.
33
AT V, 356; CSMK, 377. See also reference in note 51.
34
AT VII, 45–52;.CSM II, 31–36.
35
B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130–46.
See also McGuire, “Fate of the Date.”
36
McGuire, “Fate of the Date.”
37
In general, see Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1957); and Grant, Much Ado, chs. 7–8. See also Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristo-
telian Science, ed. Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1987), 18–23, for a treatment of Descartes
and Newton’s conceptions of extension in relation to their roots in antiquity and the Renaissance.
For Patrizi and Campanella, see John Henry, “Francesco Patrizi Da Cherso’s Concept of Space and its
Later Influence,” Annals of Science 36 (1979): 549–73.
I will begin by citing some passages from De Gravitatione which allude to the
discourse of natures. Newton tells us that we have “an exceptually clear idea of ex-
tension” and defines spatial extension as “the uniform and unlimited stretching out
[distensio] of space in length, breadth, and depth,”38 declaring that space “extends
infinitely in all directions.”39 Again he tells us that “extension is not created but
has existed eternally;”40 that it is among the natures that are “real and intelligible
in themselves;”41 and that “extension is eternal, infinite, uncreated, [and] uniform
throughout”42—a statement that links infinity explicitly with his claim that exten-
sion is uncreated and eternal. Lastly, he claims that “space is eternal in duration
and immutable in nature . . . because it is an emanative effect of an eternal and
immutable being.”43 Each of these statements expresses a characteristic typically
ascribed to natures and essences as they are known in and through themselves.
For Newton spatial extension is in fact infinite and not merely “indefinitely”
large. The Questions provide early evidence of his commitment to the actual infinity
of extension. Under the heading ‘Of Quantity,’ he says:
If extension is indefinite only in greatness and not infinite, then a point is but in-
definitely little; and yet we cannot comprehend anything less. To say that extension
is but indefinite (I mean all the extension which exists and not so much as we can
fancy) because we cannot perceive its limits, is as much as to say God is but indefinitely
perfect because we cannot apprehend his whole perfection.44
Descartes is the target here, and Newton’s point is straightforward. The scope of
what is imaginable (i.e., what we can “fancy”) provides no grounds for concluding
that extension is “indefinite only in greatness and not infinite,” just as our inability
to comprehend the fullness of God’s perfections in no way affects the reality of
divine being. Here Newton does not say how we know the infinity of extension, but
he clearly rejects the negative thesis, i.e., the claim that if things are epistemically
indeterminate to us, this means that they are indeterminate in reality.
Newton advances a similar argument in De Gravitatione:
Nor is it an objection that he takes space to be indefinite in relation to ourselves; that
is, that we are simply ignorant of its limits and do not positively know that there are
none (Part I, Art. 27, [Descartes’s Principia]). This is because although we are ignorant
beings, God at least understands that there are no limits not merely indefinitely but
certainly and positively, and because though we negatively imagine it [space] to tran-
scend all limits, yet we positively and most certainly understand that it does so.45
Again he rejects Descartes’s position: namely the claim that if it can only be
determined negatively that extension lacks limits, it must be characterized as “in-
definitely” great. In the De Gravitatione passage, Newton invokes Descartes’s use
of the distinction between what is understood by the intellect and what is grasped
by the imagination. But for Newton, unlike for Descartes, the positive infinity of
38
“De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum,” in Unpublished Papers.
39
Ibid., 101.
40
Ibid., 109.
41
Ibid., 99.
42
Ibid., 111.
43
Ibid., 104.
44
Certain Philosophical Questions, 453.
45
Unpublished Papers, 102.
spatial extension is an object of the understanding. We must not conclude from
Newton’s reading, however, that for Descartes extension’s nature is grasped solely
through the imagination or by the senses. This is amply shown by the wax argu-
ment of the Second Meditation. There, as Descartes makes clear, extension’s true
nature is grasped only by the intellect.46 Moreover, in Descartes’s view, the intel-
lect grasps extension, not as it is particularized in space, place, or body, but as it
is in itself—as that which constitutes the essence of space, place and body. The
two thinkers are divided: for Newton, extension’s infinity is grasped directly and
positively; for Descartes, to conceive extension as lacking limits (in the sense that
its limits can be successively negated, i.e., a negation of the negation) is to grasp
it negatively. Thus, in Descartes’s view, created extension must be conceived as
“indefinitely large.” Clearly, there is a crucial difference separating Newton and
Descartes. For Newton, things can be perfect and complete according to their
kind and in this sense can be positively infinite. Spatial extension falls under this
conception. But, for Descartes, God alone is positively infinite and possesses all
perfections infinitely.
A number of interrelated issues need disentangling. Let us first ask: how does
Newton conceive the infinity of spatial extension? Recall that extension is “the
uniform and unlimited stretching out of space in length, breadth, and depth,” for
space everywhere extends to infinity; and that “we cannot imagine [imaginari] any
limit anywhere without at the same time [simul] understanding [intelligamus] that
there is space beyond it.”47 For Newton, our conception of space is not restricted
to the negation of boundaries assignable to something’s extension; rather, the
understanding grasps that spatial extension transcends all limits “not merely in-
definitely, but certainly and positively.”48 It is clear, then, that the understanding,
in Newton’s view, not only grasps that space is infinite, but in so doing has a direct
and positive conception of that infinity. Although the mind cannot imagine the
infinity of extension, “we can understand it. We can imagine a greater extension,
and then a greater one, but we understand that there is a greater extension than
any we can imagine. And here, incidentally, the faculty of understanding is clearly
distinguished from imagination.”49
Newton draws on two presuppositions. First, he employs the epistemological
principle that to know how something lacks with respect to a kind presupposes a
positive conception of the genus in question. Second, he holds that any real being
“either has limits or not and so is either finite or infinite.”50 So whether or not we
can truly speak about extension lacking limits, or can imagine a state of affairs
of that sort, it is the case that an extension is, in fact, either limited or not. If it
is not limited, it is true that it is infinite, and true to say that we understand that
it is. Combining these principles, Newton holds that the imagination’s capacity
to negate the limits of a piece of extension presupposes that the understanding
grasps the eternal nature of that extension. In other words, the claim that it is
46
47
48
Ibid., 102.
49
Ibid., 101.
50
Ibid., 102.
indefinite how much extension can be imagined provides no reason for denying
that it is infinite and that it can be understood as such. Here Newton also espouses
a non-Aristotelian principle, namely, that what is unlimited is fully actual. In the
light of this principle, he links the actuality of spatial extension with the fullness
of its being. In place of Aristotle’s notion that the infinite is that beyond which
there is always something more, Newton holds that spatial extension is a completed
actuality beyond which the existence of anything else is impossible.
4. natures, perfection, and infinity

Consider the epistemic principle to which Newton appeals. Descartes’s standard
view is that the mind cannot understand the infinite by the negation of limitation.
His reasoning is straightforward. If what makes the infinite different from the
finite is positive and real, “the limitation which makes the finite different from
the infinite is non-being or the negation of being. And that which is not cannot
bring us to the knowledge of that which is; on the contrary, the negation of a thing
has to be conceived on the basis of knowledge of the thing itself.” Thus, the act
of negating a thing’s limits does not transcend the manner in which it is natured.
So although infinity is characterized in terms of negating negations, “the posi-
tive nature of the infinite” is not known by this procedure, but only that which is
cognitively “indefinite” relative to our point of view.51
Newton interprets this reasoning somewhat differently:
Should it be said that we do not understand what an infinite being is [quid sit ens
infinitum] except by negating the limits of a finite being, and that this is a negative
and faulty conception, I deny this. For the limit of a boundary is the restriction or
negation of a greater reality or existence [in respect to] the limited beings, and the
less we conceive any being whatsoever to be contained by limits, the more we under-
stand that something applies to it, that is, the more we positively conceive it. And thus
by negating all limits, the conception becomes most positive. End [finis] is a word
negative as to sense, and thus infinity, as it is the negation of a negation (that is, of
ends), will be a word most positive according to our sense and conception, though
it seems grammatically negative.52
Notice first that the context of Newton’s reference is to a specific sort of infinite
being, i.e., to infinite extension itself. Second, he appeals to the epistemic principle
that negating something’s limits depends on a prior and unrestricted conception
of the genus under which its nature falls. So if a restricted conception of a kind
presupposes a cognitively prior apprehension of the kind itself, for Newton, “ne-
gating all limits” is a legitimate way of expressing that prior conception. Thus, in
conceiving the infinite, “though we negatively imagine it to transcend all limits,
yet we positively and most certainly understand that it does so.”53 Consequently,
although an understanding of an infinite being is negatively expressed, this does
not mean that it is devoid of positive ground, if it is in fact an unrestricted nature
that the mind apprehends. On this, both Newton and Descartes agree. As noted
above, Descartes puts the point this way: “the notion I have of the infinite is in me
51
AT III, 427; CSMK, 192.
52
Unpublished Papers, 101–02.
53
Ibid., 102.
before that of the finite . . . but in order to conceive a finite being, I have to take
away something from this general notion of [infinite] being which accordingly
must be there first.”54 From this line of reasoning it follows that negating the lim-
its of a finite being does not in itself provide a positive conception of an infinite
entity. In other words, negating something’s limits, from our point of view, does
not change the finite reality which the mind apprehends. Descartes and Newton
agree again. However, Newton’s focus is on the epistemic principle, i.e., on the
notion that negating the limits of a finite thing (in regard to a particular nature)
presupposes a prior and unrestricted conception of that nature. As we will see
shortly, in Newton’s view, the principle is satisfied ontically only if the mind in fact
grasps an infinite entity of the appropriate sort.
If Newton and Descartes (broadly speaking) share the same epistemic land-
scape, then why does Descartes characterize extension as “indefinite” rather than
as infinite? The general answer is that each thinker has a radically different formal
conception of infinity. But before we come to this, consider some particular reasons
which help to elucidate Newton’s appeal to the epistemic principle. I will begin
by clarifying an important point about Descartes’s position. He agrees with New-
ton that, although we use negative language in characterizing infinity, this does
not prevent us from conceiving a thing as lacking limits in order to understand
a conception of the infinite. For Descartes, this is a formal matter of stating how
the concept of the infinite can be understood. He tells us: “I distinguish between
the formal concept of the infinite, or ‘infinity,’ and the thing which is infinite. In
the case of infinity, even if we understand it to be positive in the highest degree,
nevertheless our way of understanding it is negative, because it depends on our not
noticing any limitation in the thing.”55 It is an entirely different matter, however,
if we are making the existential claim that infinite entities exist. In this case, the
mind can understand positively that the thing is infinite but still lack an adequate
grasp of what its infinitude contains. It is at this point that the ontology of natures
comes into play. For Descartes, the nature of extension involves nothing to show
that there is, in fact, an infinitely extended entity which can be grasped as such.
Extension, for Descartes, is just corporeal extension, which implies the bounded
extension of physical bodies. On this conception, an extended body which is
infinitely extended is impossible. But it is precisely an infinitely extended space
for which Newton contends. So the difference between him and Descartes turns
on their having different formal conceptions of infinity. But just as importantly,
it rests on the fact that they disagree about what kinds of entities—extended or
otherwise—can be said to be infinite.
In Newton’s view, things can be infinite according to their kind. He says: “I see
what Descartes feared, namely, that if he should consider space infinite, it would
perhaps constitute God because of the perfection of infinity. But by no means,
for infinity is not a perfection except in so far as it is ascribed to perfections.” As
an example, he states that “Infinity of extension is so far perfect as that which is
extended.” Thus, infinity per se is not a perfection, nor is it a defining characteristic
54
AT V, 356; CSMK, 377.
55
of anything’s nature: it merely “completes” those perfections or imperfections
that a nature possesses. So, “infinity of intellect, power, happiness and so forth is
the height perfection, but infinity of ignorance, impotence, wretchedness and so
on is the height of imperfection.”56 Later in 1690, with space in mind, Newton
states this explicitly: “Things which are neither good nor evil do not by eternity
and infinity become either good or evil, but merely perfect of their own kind. No
thing is by eternity and infinity made better or of more perfect nature, but only
of longer duration in its own kind.”57
Newton’s position is clear. Infinity is not identical with perfection. Nor is it a
real or first-level attribute which “adds” to what a thing is intrinsically. Rather, it is
a second-level characterization of a thing’s perfections or imperfections, but not
itself a perfection. There are, moreover, levels of perfection or imperfection with
respect to kinds of beings, and also degrees of perfection or imperfection within
each kind, where a nature specifies the kind or class to which a thing belongs. So,
to say of something that it has a perfection infinitely states the exemplary manner
in which a particular nature manifests itself. Equally, something can instantiate
that nature in a non-exemplary way; that is, it can possess it in a less perfect man-
ner or to a lesser degree.
Clearly, Newton’s formal theory of infinity allows for the existence of differ-
ent kinds of infinite entities. He is able, then, to distinguish the nature of divine
infinity from the infinite extension of space. God is infinite because he alone is
infinitely wise, powerful, etc., where to say God’s attributes are infinite is to say he
possesses in an exemplary manner attributes which other agents own deficiently.
So, “not everything eternal and infinite will be God, nor will God be prevented
from the eternal and infinite exercise of his omnipotence in the creation and
governing of things, by the imperfect nature of created things.” But space, “by
reason of its eternity and infinity,” will not be “wise nor powerful nor alive, but
will merely be shown to be increased in duration and magnitude.” Thus, the fact
that God and space possess their attributes infinitely does not imply the identity
of their natures in infinity; for “no thing is by eternity and infinity made better or
of a more perfect nature.”58
Descartes’s view of the infinite differs significantly from Newton’s. (1) His causal
version of the ontological argument satisfies Descartes that God’s perfections
are constitutive of his essence and absolutely without limit. Since, for Descartes,
perfection and infinity are intrinsically connected, and all true perfections are
possessed by God, infinity is constitutive of God’s nature. Moreover, the possess-
ing of all perfections implies supremacy in divine nature. Therefore, there is only
one infinite substance, since to suppose the existence of more than one supreme
being is contradictory. Thus conceived, God is an infinite and pure actuality, and
divine nature alone is such that the understanding can recognize positively the
lack of all limitations. (2) It is otherwise with created things. With respect to them,
the understanding tells us only “in a negative way that any limits which they may
56
Unpublished Papers, 103–04.
57
J. E. McGuire, “Newton on Place, Time, and God: an Unpublished Source” [“Place, Time, and
God”], British Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 2 (1978), 119.
58
Ibid., 119–20.
have cannot be discovered by us.” Thus, in the extension of “imaginary space, or
the set of numbers, or the divisibility of the parts of a quantity, there is merely
some respect in which I do not recognize a limit.” So, from our point of view,
Descartes concludes, they are “indefinite,” and the term ‘infinite’ is reserved for
God alone.59 (3) For Descartes there is no distinction in re between the extension
of body and that of space: extension and that which is extended are the same,
since wherever extension is, necessarily, there is body also. Indeed, extension is
the essence of what it is to be corporeal. Thus, extension is always corporeal ex-
tension, the limits of which we know negatively. So there is nothing in Descartes’s
ontology that compels him to posit the existence of an infinite extension distinct
from corporeal extension; and lastly, (4) created extension does not possess the
unity and simplicity that satisfies the intrinsic connection between perfection and
infinity that Descartes demands. It possesses a divisible nature, such that its parts
can be separated from one another, or can be conceived to be separated. Indeed,
“[t]he very nature of body implies many imperfections . . . for it is evident that
it is a greater perfection to be undivided than to be divided, and so on.”60 Only
divine nature is truly indivisible and hence infinite: it alone satisfies Descartes
formal conception of infinity.
On the question of infinite entities, the gap separating Descartes and Newton
is instructive. In Descartes’s ontology, there is only one reality that is positively
infinite, namely, God, who is absolute infinitude. Every created thing is either
“indefinite” or finite and depends completely on God’s creative power. But, for
Newton, spatial extension is coeval with the eternal omnipresence of God. It exists
eternally because God exists necessarily. Little wonder that Newton conceives ex-
tension to be an eternal, infinite, and uncreated nature which defines the essence
of space itself. Clearly, on Newton’s picture, spatial infinity is a true actuality. But,
since infinity is not in itself a perfection, it does not detract from the splendor of
divine substance.
I want to avoid the impression that Newton’s views are based purely on meta-
physical and theological considerations. There is no doubt that the existence of
infinite space (called ‘absolute space’ in the Scholium in Principia) is warranted
for Newton theologically and metaphysically. So, contrary to what is often claimed,
the Scholium’s purpose is not to show that the existence of absolute space can be
inferred from instances of absolute motion.61 Rather, its purpose is to establish
the properties of absolute rotational motion and to distinguish them from rela-
tive measures of change. So the bucket experiment, for example, is designed to
show how we can “distinguish rest and motion, absolute and relative, one from
the other by their properties, causes, and effects.”62 This is an empirical matter
59
60
61
For a full and insightful account of these issues and their background, see Robert Rynasiewicz,
“By their Properties and Effects: Newton’s Scholium on Time, Space, Place and Motion—I. The Text,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1995): 133–53. See also his sequel article, “By their
Properties and Effects: Newton’s Scholium on Time, Space, Place and Motion—II. The Context,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 2 (1995): 295–321.
62
Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica [Principia], trans. and rev. Andrew Motte and Florian Cajori
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), vol. 1, 8.
and it involves arguing from observable states of affairs to differences—relative
and absolute—detectable in observable quantities. But in all cases, the framework
of absolute space is presupposed.
5. what exists is either finite of infinite

Newton’s view of what it is for something to exist also differs radically from
Descartes’s. He tells us: “The word ‘indefinite’ is never applied to what actually is,
but always relates to a future possibility signifying only something which is not yet
determined and definite.”63 From this perspective, anything “indefinite” cannot
exist, since the things that are must be either finite or infinite and hence deter-
minate and definable. Concerning the nature of the things that are, Newton is
an actualist. Recall the Questions passage cited above; there he says that Descartes
moves illicitly from an epistemic claim concerning the indeterminacy of extension’s
limits to the claim that extension is indeterminate in reality. He makes the same
point in De Gravitatione. The term ‘indefinite’ is reserved for unrealized but pos-
sible forms of being, and it is inappropriately said “of that which actually is.” Of
that which is, it must be possible to say that it “either has limits or not, and so is
either finite or infinite.”64 As early as the Questions, Newton makes clear into which
category existing extension falls: “It is indefinite, that is, undetermined, how great
a sphere may be made, how great a number may be reckoned, how far matter may
be divisible, how much time or extension we can fancy; but all the extension that is,
eternity, a/o are infinite.”65 For Newton, Descartes’s claim that space is indefinite
relative to us is without merit. Certainly, we do not know its limits and cannot be
certain that it has none. But God understands that space lacks limits “not merely
indefinitely but certainly and positively.”66 But how does Newton conceive the ac-
tuality of infinite extension? Well, basically as the ancient atomists conceived the
“unlimited”: extension is unlimited (actually infinite) just in case there is nothing
outside or beyond it. Given this condition, it is a completed actuality and lacks
limits, since it is impossible for anything to exist beyond it; thus understood, it is
boundless, complete, and ontically determinate.67
But there is more in Newton’s picture. Situated in the immutable actuality of
space, figures are everywhere present—“everywhere all kinds of figures, everywhere
spheres, cubes, triangles, straight lines, everywhere circular, elliptical parabolical
and all other kinds of figures, and those of all shapes and sizes, even though they are
not delineated by sight.”68 In other words, uncreated space is immutably structured
by eternal entities which are inherently present in its unlimited expanses. These
are timeless “molds”—the true and real entities—within which God creates bodies
understood to be the “product of the Divine mind realized in a definite quantity
of space.”69 So in Newton’s metaphysical schema, it is an eternal truth that space’s
63
64
Ibid.
65
66
67
The epistemic point is that the very idea of limits or bounds presupposes the idea of space
outside those bounds, an idea which converges to that of infinite space.
68
69
Ibid., 106.
infinite extension is timelessly structured by an infinity of entities, themselves the
prior conditions necessary for the actualization of bodily phenomena.
Newton also invokes his epistemic principle in a geometrical context. In a Eu-
clidean-oriented treatise written around 1665, entitled “Quantity or Muchness,”
he defines an “infinitely Great” quantum: “That quantum is infinitely Great or
greater than any finite quantity which is not increased or diminished by being
joined to a finite quantum.”70 The phrase ‘which is not increased or diminished’
refers to the term ‘quantum.’ Invoking its use, Newton is claiming that the mind
grasps a “quantum” geometrically, just as it grasps positively the infinity of spatial
extension.
But what does he mean by ‘quantum’? We get a clue at the beginning of
the treatise: “The subject of Quantity or Muchness, as it is such, may be called a
Quantum.”71 In answer to the question how much, we do not talk of quantity in
general, but always of this quantity or that quantity. So if we ask of a “quantum,”
“how much?” an appropriate answer is not forthcoming since a “quantum” is not
a specific quantity. To speak of something’s “quantity” is to refer to its length or
area; whereas, to characterize something as a quantum means simply that it can
be quantified in some respect or other. So when Newton says that a quantum is
“infinitely great,” he is not claiming that there is a quantity which is non-compara-
tively or intrinsically great. He is claiming, rather, that there is a nature—an infinite
quantum—which remains what it is when compared with a finite quantity. Indeed,
an infinite quantum is not capable of addition and division in the manner of a
finite quantity. Thus, in claiming that there is a quantum, Newton is referring to
an infinite nature which pertains to the quantitative and is presupposed by our
understanding of individual things just in case they embody that nature. In play
again is the distinction between being a nature and having a nature, as well as the
epistemic notion that a nature defines a sort or class, such that something is finite
in reference to the class if it lacks, in an appropriate way, what the infinite nature
possesses. Clearly, the unlimited distension of spatial extension expresses fully the
nature of extension under the description of an infinite quantum.
6. descartes pitted against himself?

What does all of this come to? Newton is undoubtedly appealing to an ontology
of natures in constructing his theory of absolute space. He tells us that “we have
an exceptionally clear idea of extension” in itself; that its mode of existing “falls
under neither substance nor accident”; and that it “is, as it were, an emanative effect
of God, [tanquam Dei effectus emanativus] and an affection of all being whatsoever
that subsists.”72 Clearly, on this view, extension’s manner of existing—it is the es-
sential nature of space—fits none of the traditional categories of being. Moreover,
70
Isaac Newton, University Library, Cambridge, MS. Add. 3995, Folio 9.
71
Ibid. Italics mine.
72
Unpublished Papers, 99. For a detailed discussion of Newton’s idea that space is neither a sub-
stance nor an accident, and its background in thinkers such as Patrizi and Gassendi, see J. E. McGuire,
“Predicates of Pure Existence: Newton on God’s Space and Time” [“Predicates of Pure Existence”],
in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science (MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass, 1990): 91–108; and
McGuire, “Space and Time,” 2–9.
given that its mode of being is coeternal with Divine existence, it is the uncreated
“receptacle” within which bodily phenomena come to actuality.
This is metaphysics. But notice Newton’s claim in the General Scholium to the
Principia:
In bodies, we see only their figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch
only their outward surfaces, we smell only smells, and taste only the savors; but their
inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of
our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God.73
Newton’s point is that we have no more idea of divine or bodily essence than a
blind man has of color: bodies are known solely by their outward properties, and
God through divine power manfested in creation.74
This raises the question I broached at the outset: how does Newton’s appeal to
the uncreated nature of extension square with his methodology of arguing directly
and positively from the phenomena? We can understand his denying the possibil-
ity of knowing the inner essence of God. But how do we understand his denying
that the nature of bodies is knowable, while claiming we have an exceptionally
clear idea of extension itself?
Notice that Newton does not deny the existence of natures or essences as such.
His claim is epistemic, namely, that we do not have access to certain natures,
among them the nature of God and the nature of bodies. He tells us that, far from
existing necessarily, bodies depend on divine will and that no constraints obtain
on how God may have created them. This claim is prompted by his voluntarism.
Given the free exercise of God’s creative will (which lies beyond our comprehen-
sion), we cannot infer from our sensory experience of bodies to their “essential
and metaphysical constitution.” So Newton states emphatically that he cannot
“say positively what the nature of bodies is.”75 This reflects what I call Newton’s
‘Hobbesianism’: “The nature of things is more securely and naturally deduced
from their operations one upon another than upon our senses.” Here the phrase
‘operations one upon another’ refers not only to the operation of bodies on one
another, but to their operation on the object that is the human body, and also to
the mutual interaction of its various parts.
However, the epistemic basis for our conception of infinite extension is differ-
ent. For Newton, geometry supplies content in terms of which the mind grasps that
something is infinite. After claiming in De Gravitatione that space “extends infinitely
in all directions,” and everywhere possesses inherent figures, Newton says that “you
may have in truth an example of something infinite; imagine any triangle whose
base and one side are at rest and the other side so turns about the contiguous end
of its base in the plane of the triangle that the triangle is by degrees opened at the
vertex.”76 That is, as two sides of the triangle rotate towards parallelism with one
another, the array of intersection points traversed before they reach parallelism
is infinite. In other words, there is no last point where they meet. What is infinite
is not the distance to the last point, but rather the array of intersection points
73
Isaac Newton, Principia, vol. II, 545–46.
74
75
76
traversed before the lines reach parallelism. This provides a basis for understand-
ing that a line lacking an upper bound is infinite. Newton’s intuition should not
be misconstrued. He is not saying that, as there is no procedure for determining
the last point on the line traversed, the line is greater than any we can assign. In
other words, he is denying that the line is constructively infinite. This means that
his positive claim is that there is no last point. This is an existence claim, and it is
tantamount to claiming that the line is infinitely extended.
In Locus et Tempus (1690), Newton also cites geometrical examples to illustrate
actual infinities, one of which is equivalent to the De Gravitatione example. It consid-
ers how infinite loci are generated by a point on a moving line. For instance, “if any
straight line is revolved round a fixed point with uniform motion, and meanwhile
cuts another straight line fixed in position, the point of intersection in each revolu-
tion will twice go to infinity and twice return from infinity.” This states that if a line
sweeps out 360° and is intersecting a fixed line in each revolution, it goes twice
to infinity, and twice it returns from infinity. As in the previous example, Newton
seeks to give content to the notion that what is swept out is actually “greater than
any finite length.”77 And it is no stretch to imagine that the line which fixes the
point of rotation is itself rotating so that the line rotating around the fixed point
goes to infinity and back again in all directions.
It is important to be clear about the status of Newton’s position. Consider
again Descartes’s distinction between understanding that x is infinite while being
unable to comprehend or conceive the infinitude that x contains. He tells Mer-
senne on May 27, 1630: “it is possible to know that God is infinite and all-powerful
although our mind, being finite, cannot grasp or conceive him . . . [T]o grasp
something is to embrace it in one’s thought; to know something it is sufficient
to touch it with one’s thought.”78 Descartes sets forth the same argument in the
First Reply, using the example of “seeing” the ocean directly while being unable
to comprehend its entire vastness. He applies the distinction to our knowledge
of God: in God alone we understood clearly and distinctly that no limits of any
kind can be found. Thus, we are able to grasp that God is positively infinite while
being unable to comprehend adequately everything that God’s eternal nature
includes.79 This questionable separation of understanding and conceiving Newton
accepts regarding our knowledge of Divine nature, since he agrees with Descartes
that the inner essence of God is unknowable. However, he denies that it applies
to our knowledge of spatial extension. On the contrary, we understand that it is
infinite and grasp positively what its infinite nature contains: unlimited dimen-
sions, immutability, an inherent structure, and unresisting penetrability. These
are intrinsically linked in its eternal nature, and we grasp that content through
itself clearly and distinctly. Thus, as Newton articulates it, spatial extension is a
nature whose positive infinity we understand. And we grasp its content by means
of readily intuitable concepts—lines, angles, intersections, and parallelisms, etc.:
all conceptions locatable in operations directly experienced and warranted by
77
McGuire, “Place, Time, and God.”
78
AT I, 152; CSMK, 25.
79
the geometry of moving loci. On these grounds, and given its relation to divine
existence, it is a true and immutable entity.
7. god and space: coeternal natures

It is clear, for Newton, that the uncreated nature of space exists as an effect ex-
ternal to God. Moreover, its ontological status is that of a real and extra-mental
reality. Given this ontological picture, how is its relation to God to be understood?
Recall the account I gave of Descartes’s causal theory of how eminent, objective,
and formal realities relate. I said that these relations reflect—when referred to
the modes of existence of extension—the ontic distinctions between the claims
that there are natures and natured things exist—or, equivalently, between being a na-
ture and having a nature. I also remarked that Descartes’s position presupposes,
at least implicitly, a picture of exemplar causation involving the epistemic notion
that natures have an objective reality within the conceiving mind. So, in regard
to how space’s eternal nature relates to God’s necessary existence, I need to ask
whether that relation is understood according to the Augustinian-Platonic model
of exemplar causation, where the distinction between being a nature and having a
nature has its roots.80
Consider first how Newton conceives the relationship between the eternal
nature of space and God’s necessary existence. He says that extension “is, as it
were, an emanative effect of God.” This language articulates a “causal” picture
of space’s relation to God by invoking God as a cause of which space is the sepa-
rate effect. It also involves the claim that the uncreated extension of space is, as
such, an eternal precondition for the existence of all entities, God included; for
“space is an affection of being qua being. No being exists, or can exist, which is
not related to space [non . . . ad spatium refertur] in some way. God is everywhere,
created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space it occupies; and what is
neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist.”81 The caveat, ‘as it were,’ must
be taken seriously. Elsewhere, I have argued that God’s relationship to space can
be understood as a special form of efficient causation. This conception embraces
the idea that divine power is prior to its acts, where priority of this sort can be un-
derstood as obtaining between things existing at the same time, or, as in the case
of God and his acts, between realities which exist together eternally. Accordingly,
causal priority so understood means that causes need not precede their effects, but
most importantly, that they need not exist in time at all.82 On this picture, causal
priority among eternal things is not parasitic on a model of productive causation
which fits finitely created things. It seems evident that emanative causation, as
Newton understands it, reflects this relationship between God’s necessary existence
and space’s uncreated nature: space exists always because God exists necessarily.
Moreover, since the notion of an eternal and efficient cause does not necessarily
involve activity, production, creation, or active efficacy between it and its effect,
80
I am indebted to Tad Schmaltz for raising the question whether Newton’s infinite space stands
in a relation of exemplar causation to God’s creative power. I thank him also for our subsequent email
discussion. He is not, of course, responsible for any problems in what I say.
81
Unpublished Papers, 99 and 103.
82
McGuire, “Predicates of Pure Existence,” 105.
the distinction between ontic and causal dependence essentially collapses. Notice
that Newton’s conception differs from Descartes’s notion that God is the eter-
nally efficient and actively continuing cause of all there is. However, both causal
models stress the utter dependence of that which is on God. For Descartes, God
continually creates the world, and in doing so, His concern is only with its pres-
ent state at the very moment in which He creates it.83 For Newton, infinite space
is immutably present with divine being, the latter the condition necessary for its
omnitemporal existence.
Consider again the distinction between is a nature and has a nature. Newton’s
claim is that extension itself is identical with the structure of eternal, immutable,
and infinite space. In other words, infinite extension—the essence of space it-
self—is a nature; whereas, the particular geometrical figures inherent in space have
a nature. They are spheres, cubes, triangles, etc., which constitute determinate
regions within extension itself. This satisfies Newton’s epistemic principle, since
these delimited regions presuppose immutable extension, lacking as they do the
intrinsic completeness of its nature. But it also shows that the Augustinian-Platonic-
Cartesian conception—according to which temporal, finite, and created things
depend “causally” for their existence on exemplary ideas in God’s mind—does
not fit Newton’s ontology of infinite space. In the case of the creation of specific
objects in space, their natures reflect exemplary ideas in God’s mind but, as cre-
ated natured things, they exist with a lower level of perfection. However, as I have
just indicated, the eternal nature of extension is identical with infinite space itself
and stands to God in the relation of eternal causation. Thus, there is no question
that extension per se exists in the Divine mind (a condition necessary for exemplar
causation), since its mode of being is identical with infinite space itself. This does
not mean that Newton’s God lacks an idea of extension’s immutable nature. God
is omniscient and possesses all ideas perfectly, including that of infinite exten-
sion: He is “all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not
at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to
us.”84 But it does mean that infinite space, understood as Newton understands
it, does not depend on God’s eternal ideas in the manner of Descartes’s theory
of eternal truths. It is simply there: an ens actu, and a coeternal consequence of
God’s necessary existence.
To sum up, natures are eternal and depend on the divine intellect. Entities
that exist in time and have a nature are present in the divine intellect eminently
and, as created entities, they depend on God according to as they stand to him in
the relation of exemplar causation. Newton’s ontological commitments force him
to qualify this picture. For him the immutable nature of space is, in and of itself,
83
AT VII, 48; CSM II, 33. The Meditations and the Principles enrich Descartes account of God’s
efficient causation beyond what is present in the letters to Mersenne in 1630. The same core concept
is in play but, in these later writings, Descartes works through the implications of his position and adds
to the thesis that causation and existence are co-extensive (see note 21) the notions (1) that cause and
effect are simultaneous, (2) that a cause is only affecting when it is in fact acting, and (3) the claim that
the parts of time are independent and never co-exist, so that “from the fact that we now exist it does
not follow that we shall exist a moment from now, unless there is some cause . . . which continually
produces us, as it were, that is to say, which keeps us in existence” (AT VIII.1, 13; CSM I, 200).
84
Isaac Newton, Principia, vol. II, 545.
an eternal effect sustained by God. As such, its existence is one of ontic or causal
dependence on God and not one of standing in a relation of exemplification to a
divine idea. In short, it is an eternal nature. But the real existence of that nature
would lack any raison d’etre apart from the necessity of divine being.
8. conclusion
Newton’s position on space stands in stark contrast to Locke’s, whose empiricism
he is thought to share. For Locke, the mind can have an idea of the infinity of
space but not an idea of an actually infinite space.85 Newton affirms what Locke
denies. The task for Locke is to construct an idea of the infinity of space from
particular, sensory ideas. Newton’s task is different: it is to show that infinitely ex-
tended space is a positive and real nature conceived by the understanding. Thus,
for him, it is impossible to construct by abstraction an idea of the actual infinity
of space from sensory ideas. Quite the contrary, what the intellect understands,
aided by geometry, is that the infinite nature of extension is present essentially in
the actuality of space and is known through itself. As such, it is a true and immu-
table entity. It is this infinite nature that the intellect grasps positively within the
procedures made possible by the geometry of moving loci. If Newton’s theology of
divine existence grounds the actuality of infinite space, geometry underwrites his
claim to understand its infinite nature. Clearly, the depth of Newton’s dialogue
with Descartes must be appreciated if we are adequately to understand his path
to this conception.
85
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell (New York:
Dover Publications, 1959), vol. 1, 2.xvii.4, 278.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

a dialogue with descartes 103

A Dialogue with Descartes:

my topic is newton’s cartesianism. His account of space’s metaphysical ground-

* J. E. McGuire is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 1 (2007) 103–125

1. newton’s reading of descartes

2. descartes’s true and immutable natures

This mode of reasoning is enshrined in the Meditations, and it plays an important

4. natures, perfection, and infinity

5. what exists is either finite of infinite

6. descartes pitted against himself?

7. god and space: coeternal natures

You might also like

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton&#39;s Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton&#39;s Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton&#39;s Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

a dialogue with descartes 103

A Dialogue with Descartes:

my topic is newton’s cartesianism. His account of space’s metaphysical ground-

* J. E. McGuire is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 1 (2007) 103–125

1. newton’s reading of descartes

2. descartes’s true and immutable natures

This mode of reasoning is enshrined in the Meditations, and it plays an important

4. natures, perfection, and infinity

5. what exists is either finite of infinite

6. descartes pitted against himself?

7. god and space: coeternal natures

You might also like

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures

J. E. McGuire - A Dialogue With Descartes. Newton's Ontology of True and Immutable Natures