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.
History of the philosophy of field theory
Field theory, the study of dynamical fields in physics, was originally a mathematical formulation of Newtonian mechanics. The success of Newtonian physics since the publication of Isaac Newton's "Principia" in 1687 provided a framework with which to investigate the motion and forces associated with electricity and magnetism. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb showed in 1785 that the repulsive force between two electrically charged spheres obeys the same (up to a sign) force law as Newton's law of universal gravitation: the force between two bodies is directed along the line separating the bodies and its magnitude is proportional to the product of their charges (for gravitation, their masses) divided by the square of their distance apart. André-Marie Ampère showed in 1823 that the force between infinitesimal lengths of current-carrying wires similarly obeys an inverse-square law such that the force is directed along the line of separation between the wire elements.