Gravity must be caused by some agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.
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"Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation."
"It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity."
"The best way to understand is by examples."
"God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced…"
"What is it that induces a man to be a philosopher? It is not the love of truth, but the love of fame, or the love of novelty, or the love of power."
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Newton is saying gravity clearly operates through some consistent, rule-following mechanism or agent, but he deliberately refuses to declare whether that cause is physical matter or something metaphysical. He describes how gravity behaves with mathematical precision while explicitly declining to answer what ultimately produces it. Identify the pattern, calculate the effect, prove the law — but don't speculate beyond what evidence can demonstrate.
Newton coined 'Hypotheses non fingo' — I frame no hypotheses — as a methodological creed. Deeply religious, he spent more time writing theology than physics, viewing God as a plausible agent behind natural forces. Yet as a mathematician he demanded demonstrated proof over speculation. His Principia Mathematica delivered exact gravitational laws while he refused to commit on their metaphysical cause, perfectly embodying that lifelong tension.
The 17th century saw natural philosophy straining to separate from theology. Descartes and Leibniz championed mechanical causation — everything required physical contact to explain it. Newton's action-at-a-distance gravity scandalized them; Leibniz called it an occult quality. Meanwhile the Church remained powerful, and linking God to natural law was intellectually serious, not just pious. Whether immaterial agents could drive physical phenomena was a live, urgent debate, not a rhetorical one.
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