How can we explain or investigate one part of nature when everything around it is also acting upon it? This question connects my book project, Constituting Systems, to the seventeenth-century debate over matter, motion, and the possibility of a vacuum. Descartes described a universe entirely filled with matter, where circulating currents and vast vortices explained physical processes, including planetary motion. Newton’s unfinished manuscript De gravitatione challenges Descartes’s understanding of space, bodies, and motion while investigating how bodies and fluids can remain in equilibrium. Taking this manuscript as my starting point, I explore how Newton’s philosophy and mathematical reasoning developed together: how could a world of interacting bodies be divided into manageable objects of inquiry, and what justified the simplifications involved? The comparison reveals that the emergence of modern physics involved both new laws of nature and new ways of deciding which bodies, boundaries, and interactions an explanation must include.

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