Newton's rejection of myriad Cartesian and mechanist views was a revolutionary development in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy. He reconfigured the relationship between physics and metaphysics, transforming crucial metaphysical questions into empirical issues while granting others a basic autonomy from the development of empirical science. This left Newton's physics with a parallel autonomy from the metaphysical presuppositions insisted upon in various ways by the Cartesians and the mechanists. Newton's conception of natural philosophy was novel in its emphasis on employing mathematical, especially geometrical, techniques to understand how motions of various kinds arise from forces of various kinds. But his consistent contention that the study of the divine represents a proper part of natural philosophy was more commonplace. And this vision of divine metaphysics has a traditional cast to it: like many figures in his day, Newton understands the world as consisting of substances that can act only where and when they are present. Among all of those substances, only one is infinite and necessary; the rest are finite and contingent. Yet even Newton's use of traditional metaphysical categories is modified by his controversial insistence that all substances, even God, are spatiotemporal entities whose action is limited to their location within space and time. These form essential components of Newton's limited but deeply held Weltanschauung.

The basic elements in that Weltanschauung were articulated especially through Newton's dissatisfaction with Cartesian metaphysics.