 It certainly seems that Newton was uncomfortable with the very idea of action at a distance. But of course, things are not always as they seem in interpretations of difficult philosophical texts: some historians and philosophers have argued strongly that there are other readings of the  letter.[25]  Rather than rejecting distant action between material bodies per se, they argue, Newton may have been rejecting a particular version of that idea, one associated with the “Epicurean” view that gravity is somehow an essential feature of all material bodies, a stronger view than Newton might wish to endorse. The idea might be roughly as follows: Newton wanted to leave open the possibility that God had endowed bodies with a power to act at a distance on one another, a position that is at least reminiscent of Locke’s view in his correspondence with Stillingfleet (see above). The reason is that Newton held the standard view at the time that matter itself is passive, requiring some kind of divine intervention in order to interact causally with other matter. Again, one finds a Lockean echo of this idea (which may be no accident): Locke sometimes suggests that matter itself is passive in the sense that it cannot move itself; instead, motion must be “superadded” to it by God. If the world consisted solely of a bunch of material objects, say rocks floating in interstellar space, then they would not experience any changes in their states of motion unless some external force acted upon them. Left to its own devices, matter is passive and does not move. To argue, as some “Epicurean” philosophers may have done, that matter itself essentially contains gravity as a feature, is to deny that matter is passive; it is to suggest that the rocks in interstellar space would attract one another and begin to move “on their own”, without any external force influencing them. And this, in turn, might lead us on a slippery slope to atheism, for on this view, matter would act on its own, without any divine intervention. Or so Bentley and Newton might be interpreted.