When we think of seventeenth-century conceptions of space, time, and motion, we do not tend to think of Descartes as making a crucial contribution; and when we think of Descartes's philosophy, we do not tend to think of his understanding of space, time, and motion as particularly significant. But Descartes's views – as part of what has aptly been called his metaphysical physics – are essential for understanding Newton's conception of space and motion. The publication by Marie Boas and Rupert Hall of Newton's previously unpublished manuscript, now known as De Gravitatione, in the early 1960s helped to underscore this fact, for the text provides an extensive response to Descartes's view of space and motion in Principia Philosophiae. Indeed, De Gravitatione greatly clarifies Newton's more famous, but much more concise, discussion of space, time, and motion in the Scholium to the Principia, first published some forty-three years after Descartes's work appeared. The discussion in De Gravitatione of the failures of the Cartesian physics of motion sheds light on the motivations for introducing absolute space in the Scholium to the Principia. It also clarifies and expands the characterization of God's relation to space in the General Scholium that lies at the heart of Newton's divine metaphysics.

Nonetheless, there are crucial differences between De Gravitatione and the Principia. For instance, although the former clarifies the discussion of absolute space in the latter, De Gravitatione never addresses the famous distinction between relative and absolute motion.