In 1713 Newton finally published the second edition of the Principia. Its changes included not only the new Rules of Philosophising discussed in III.1, but also the very famous General Scholium. This chapter provides the fullest ever contextualisation and interpretation of that text. It charts in detail how Newton’s dispute with Leibniz led him to double-down on his anti-metaphysical stance, and to declare many questions – not least concerning causation – to be beyond the boundaries of legitimate natural philosophy (now described as ‘experimental’). Second, it shows that Newton’s talk of the ‘God of Dominion’ was derived from Samuel Clarke’s recent writings – in line with Clarke’s position, Newton had now moved away from his earlier neo-Arianism into a position of trinitarian nescience in which all speculation on the subject, with consubstantialist or Arian, was dismissed as ‘metaphysical’. The role played by the ‘God of Dominion’ was simply the standard refrain of Newtonian natural theology: that the true conception of the divine that could be predicated from nature was not of an impersonal metaphysical first principle, but of a living God. Finally, Newton’s talk of God’s ‘substantial’ omnipresence was again not a concession to metaphysical thinking, but a residue of yet another polemic devised by his friend Samuel Clarke, this time against the freethinker Anthony Collins.

This chapter focusses on the famous queries appended to the Latin Optice, in which Newton made some notorious – but also very ambiguous – statements about space being akin to the divine sensorium. Many commentators have speculated about how this implied a metaphysics of divine omnipresence. It is shown that this was not the case – rather, Newton was developing the anti-metaphysical analogical natural theology he had first conceived in the 1690s. But now, his argument took on a new, polemically anti-Cartesian dimension. This was the result of the influence on him of some of his followers, above all Samuel Clare, the translator of the English Opticks. Indeed, there is very strong circumstantial evidence that Clarke was actively involved in the composition of the new material in the Optice queries, or at least their natural-theological material. That material also owed a debt to another early Newtonian, the Scottish physician George Cheyne.

During the Scientific Revolution, philosophers wondered how best to understand space. Many debates revolved around the account advanced in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1644), and this chapter treats it as a focal point. Descartes argued for a return to the Aristotelian view that there is no difference in reality between space and matter, entailing that empty space—space empty of matter—is impossible. Over the next century, all kinds of philosophers attacked this position, and this chapter takes their rejections of Cartesian space as a starting point for exploring alternative views. A varied selection of philosophers who reject Cartesian space are discussed, in chronological order: Henry More, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton, Catharine Cockburn, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The sheer breadth of alternative theories of space they advance demonstrates the metaphysical richness of this era. Nonetheless, there is a deep agreement among their alternatives: all the accounts agree on the features of space. This base agreement set the scene for Kant’s theory of space, advanced after the Scientific Revolution ended.