George Berkeley
Berkeley argued that forces and gravity, as defined by Newton, constituted "occult qualities" that "expressed nothing distinctly". He held that those who posited "something unknown in a body of which they have no idea and which they call the principle of motion, are in fact simply stating that the principle of motion is unknown." Therefore, those who "affirm that active force, action, and the principle of motion are really in bodies are adopting an opinion not based on experience." Forces and gravity existed nowhere in the phenomenal world. On the other hand, if they resided in the category of "soul" or "incorporeal thing", they "do not properly belong to physics" as a matter. Berkeley thus concluded that forces lay beyond any kind of empirical observation and could not be a part of proper science. He proposed his theory of signs as a means to explain motion and matter without reference to the "occult qualities" of force and gravity.
Exchange force
One of the earliest uses of the term "interaction" was in a discussion by Niels Bohr in 1913 of the interaction between the negative electron and the positive nucleus. Exchange forces were introduced by Werner Heisenberg (1932) and Ettore Majorana (1933) in order to account for the saturation of binding energy and of nuclear density. This was done in analogy to the quantum mechanical theory of covalent bonds, such as exist between two hydrogen atoms in the hydrogen molecule wherein the chemical force is attractive if the wave function is symmetric under exchange of coordinates of the electrons and is repulsive if the wave function is anti-symmetric in this respect.