ABSTRACT
The modern conception of nature was not Newton's but a post-Newtonian development, emerging in the course of the eighteenth century. It was the product of a conflation of the great systems of the seventeenth century, chiefly the Cartesian, the Newtonian, and the Leibnizian, through the elimination of their incompatible features and those, such as Newton's theology and Leibniz's doctrine of pre-established harmony, which were found especially hard to accept. The two domains, natural philosophy and mental philosophy were thus disastrously separated, disastrously for both. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the dominant Cartesian natural philosophy began giving way to the Newtonian. Leibniz was fully in agreement with Newton in his insistence on some 'active principle' as the source of motion. He was influenced by Cordemoy's conception, but he saw that it retained all the difficulties of material atomism.
