"Descartes was liable to be misled by too easy an acceptance of data that had been handed down by scholastic writers. ...two grand Aristotelian principles helped to condition the form of the universe as he reconstructed it—first, the view that a vacuum is impossible, and secondly, the view that objects could only influence one another if they actually touched—there could be no such thing as attraction, no such thing as . ...Descartes insisted that every fraction of space should be fully occupied all the time by continuous matter... infinitely divisible. The particles were... packed so tightly that one of them could not move without communicating the commotion to the rest. The matter formed whirlpools in the skies, and it was because the planets were caught each in its own whirlpool that they were carried around... all similarly caught in a larger whirlpool, which had the sun as its centre... Gravity itself was the result of these whirlpools of invisible matter which had the effect of sucking things down towards their centre. ...In the time of Newton the system of Descartes and the theory of vortices or whirlpools proved to be vulnerable to both mathematical and experimental attack."