 Newton took special interest in the Cartesian view of space and body, and in related views concerning the causal relations between minds and bodies and between God and the bodies that constitute the natural world. Like many of Newton’s contemporaries in Cambridge in those days, he encountered these Cartesian views within the context of Henry More’s then famous discussions of Cartesianism (a term coined by More himself). Beginning with his correspondence with Descartes in 1648 (Lewis 1953), and continuing with a series of publications in later years, many of which Newton owned in his personal library (Harrison 1978), More argued that Descartes made two fundamental mistakes: first, he wrongly contended that extension and matter are identical (and that the world is therefore a plenum); and second, he mistakenly believed that God and the mind were not extended substances, which made their causal interactions with such substances mysterious. Just as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia had raised fundamental objections to Cartesian dualism (see Shapiro 2007) in the early 1640s, More raised similar objections against the Cartesian view of the divine a few years later (Lewis 1953). Descartes agreed with More’s suggestion that God can act anywhere on nature if he so chooses, and came very close to accepting More’s contention that such a view entails that God must be present within the world wherever he in fact chooses to act. For how could God part the Red Sea, suggested More, unless God were present precisely where the Red Sea is located? Of course, More agreed that God is not made of parts, cannot be imagined, and cannot be affected by the causal activity of material bodies—the causal arrow flows only in one direction. But More concluded that God is extended in his own way. If one fixes Descartes’s two basic mistakes, one obtains what More regarded as a proper philosophical view: space is distinct from matter because it is extended but penetrable, whereas matter is extended but impenetrable; and, in tandem, all substances are extended, but whereas some, such as tables and chairs, are impenetrable, others, such as the mind and God, are penetrable and therefore not  material.[13]  Newton was deeply influenced both by More’s criticisms of Descartes and by his positive philosophical conception of space and the divine.