Abstract

This paper discusses the manner in which Isaac Newton proposed to account for the phenomenon of action at a distance. His struggles arose from the attempt to maintain the corpuscular metaphysics common in his day. In psychology the same difficulty arises in accounting for the effects of past events on present behaviors. Traditional theories account for this "psychological action at a distance" by proposing various constructs and structures that serve the same function that aether served in the physical explanations of Newton's day. The paper argues that such explanations are unsatisfactory, and unnecessary once the assumptions of the metaphysic of things are given up. An alternative understanding of human action grounded in interpretation and free from the constraints of linear time and corpuscular metaphysics is presented to account for the subtle relationship of past events to present ones