This was the conception of Descartes, and was perhaps the true idea of Newton himself.

Newton points out, in many passages, that the laws he had discovered were independent of the hypotheses that could be formed on the way in which universal attraction was produced, but that with sufficient experiments the true cause of this attraction might one day be reached.

In the preface to the second edition of the Optics he writes: "To prove that I have not considered weight as a universal property of bodies, I have added a question as to its cause, preferring this form of question because my interpretation does not entirely satisfy me in the absence of experiment"; and he puts the question in this shape: "Is not this medium (the ether) more rarefied in the interior of dense bodies like the sun, the planets, the comets, than in the empty spaces which separate them?
Passing from these bodies to great distances, does it not become continually denser, and in that way does it not produce the weight of these great bodies with regard to each other and of their parts with regard to these bodies, each body tending to leave the most dense for the most rarefied parts ?" Evidently this view is incomplete, but we may endeavour to state it precisely.

If we admit that this medium, the properties of which would explain the attraction, is the same as the luminous ether, we may first ask ourselves whether the action of gravitation is itself also due to oscillations.

Some authors have endeavoured to found a theory on this hypothesis, but we are immediately brought face to face with very serious difficulties.