 This passage is bound to confuse readers. On the one hand, Clarke is clearly arguing that the Newtonians refuse to restrict their understanding of causal interactions in nature to mechanical cases; on the other, however, he does not accept what many at that time would have regarded as the obvious implication of this denial of mechanism, namely that action at a distance is perfectly possible (a move embraced by some later in the eighteenth century, such as Kant). Instead, Clarke not only rejects action at a distance, as Newton possibly had before him; he contends that it isn’t even logically possible! In his various pronouncements to Bentley and others, Newton never contended that action at a distance was simply a contradiction and therefore impossible, presumably even for the divine being, who is typically said to be capable of creating any situation that does not instantiate a contradiction (although Descartes’s views on the eternal truths are obviously more complicated). Clarke’s view raises a serious problem for Newtonians: if action at a distance is simply a contradiction, and therefore not a possible physical situation, even with divine intervention, then how should one interpret the theory of universal gravity, which certainly appears to indicate that distant action is perfectly possible, and perhaps even actual? If we interpret the theory as postulating actual distant action, say between the moon and the earth, then it clearly must be mistaken; but even if we interpret it less strongly, as merely postulating that distant action between the moon and the earth is possible, that would presumably disqualify the theory as well. Perhaps one can save Clarke’s view by contending that since distant action is logically impossible, Newton’s theory must therefore be interpreted as neutral on that issue. This is one issue where Clarke’s views may differ substantially from Newton’s own. Regardless of whether Clarke represented Newton’s own views faithfully, there is no doubt that his correspondence with Leibniz helped to shape the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth century.