  Force was to prove a productive addition to experimental science in no uncertain manner in the eighteenth century. Force laws in addition to the law of gravitation, involving elasticity, surface tension, electric and magnetic attractions and so on were experimentally identified and put to productive use. In the domain of science, scruples about the ontological status of forces were forgotten and this attitude spread to philosophy. Eighteenth-century updates of mechanical atomism typically included gravity and other forces amongst the primary properties of atoms. Acceptance of force as an ontological primitive is evident in an extreme form in the 1763 reformulation of Newtonian atomism by R. Boscovich (1966). In his philosophy of matter atoms became mere points (albeit possessing mass) acting as centres of force, the forces varying with the distance from the centre and oscillating between repulsive and attractive several times before becoming the inverse square law of gravitation at sensible distances. The various short-range attractive and repulsive forces were appealed to as explanations of the cohesion of atoms in bulk materials, chemical combination and also elasticity. Short-range repulsive forces varying with distance enabled Boscovich to remove the instantaneous rebounds of atoms that had been identified as an incoherency in Newton's own atomism stemming from their absolute hardness and inelasticity.