Newton, in fact, could only get over the ‘absurdity’ of his own concept by invoking either an ubiquitous ether (whose attributes were equally paradoxical) and/or God in person. The whole notion of a ‘force’ which acts instantly at a distance without an intermediary agent, which traverses the vastest distances in zero seconds, and pulls at immense stellar objects with ubiquitous ghost-fingers – the whole idea is so mystical and ‘unscientific’, that ‘modern’ minds like Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes, who were fighting to break loose from Aristotelian animism, would instinctively tend to reject
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