 Clearly, one reasonable motive for uncovering a nuanced interpretation of Newton’s letter to Bentley is the obvious fact that Newton apparently regarded action at a distance as perfectly possible when writing the Principia. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the Principia with the Bentley correspondence. One can argue that although he left open the possibility of action at a distance in his main work, Newton himself did not accept that possibility because of his more general commitments. The debate on such matters continues unabated. However, regardless of Newton’s personal attitude toward distant action among material bodies, his mechanist interlocutors and readers continued to object to the physical theory outlined in Book III of the Principia on the grounds that, at the very least, it left open the conceptual possibility of a kind of action that cannot in fact exist anywhere in nature. That remained one of Leibniz’s principal objections against Newtonian natural philosophy throughout the last twenty years of his life, animating his correspondence with numerous figures, including most prominently the Newtonian theologian and philosopher Samuel Clarke.