Newton's laws leave gravity's cause unexplained
not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts
Newton himself supplies a qualification to this portrait of scientific confidence. In the General Scholium, he distinguishes explaining celestial motions by gravity from identifying gravity's cause. He acknowledges that the latter remains undiscovered, while maintaining that experimentally established laws still explain motions. The inspected witness is the Newton Project's normalized transcription of Andrew Motte's 1729 English translation, volume II, page 392; it translates the third Principia edition of 1726. The Scholium first appeared in the second edition of 1713, as the Newton Project Canada edition guide specifies.
Chesterton's charge thus works best against an additional philosophical claim: that knowing how events regularly occur makes their occurrence logically necessary or ultimately self-explanatory. Newton's own statement allows a middle position between that claim and merely collecting disconnected marvels: a mathematical law can unify and explain observations while leaving the cause of the force unresolved. This does not settle Chesterton's argument about necessity, but it prevents his generalized scientific spokesman from being mistaken for Newton's own position.
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