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Descartes was the most prominent member of a community of '''corpuscularist''' thinkers, who maintained that visible objects were made of unobservably tiny particles, whose relations and arrangement were responsible for the properties of visible bodies. In this '''mechanical natural philosophy''', particles influenced one another only by direct physical contact, which was the cause of all motion, and ultimately all change.[[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]] One of the attractions of these ideas is that, unlike Aristotle's, they allowed for a movable planetary Earth, and celestial motions weren't different in kind from terrestrial motions. They explained gravity, in qualitative terms, as due to a swirling vortex of particles around the Earth, which pushed things towards its center. In accord with Copernican heliocentrism, Descartes posited that a larger vortex surrounded the sun, with the smaller planetary vorticies caught in a larger solar vortex.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]] In Newton's time, major champions of the mechanical natural philosophy included Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who was to become a major rival of Newton's.
For Descartes, the ultimate justification of knowledge claims lie with human reason and the absence of doubt. He relied on classical methods of theorizing and conjectured hypotheses in order to construct scientific propositions.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Such a '''rationalist''' approach to knowledge was also championed by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.[[CiteRef::Lennon and Dea (2014)]] But, by the early 17th century, experimental researchers like Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle (1627-1691) had begun to elaborate and practice a very different approach to knowledge based on experimentation and extensive use of mathematics. Following the '''inductive methodology''' advocated by [[Francis Bacon]](1561-1626), they maintained that theoretical principles emerged from experimental data by a process of '''inductive generalization'''. However, there were also dissenters like Newton's contemporary Christiaan Huygens, who believed that most experimental work involved formulating hypotheses about unobservable entities, which were tested by their observable consequences. This was an early form of '''hypothetico-deductivism'''. Newton rejected Cartesian rationalism, and argued that the Cartesians did not sufficiently employ mathematics and experimentation in their work. He rejected the method of hypotheses outright. [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]][[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] He supported '''inductivism''', and held epistemological views similar to those of his contemporary and friend [[John Locke]](1632-1704), who maintained that all knowledge came from experience.[[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]]
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