“ It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion. ”
 Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1887). copy citation

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“On this hypothesis, the hammering of the ultra-mundane corpuscles on the bob confers its kinetic energy, on the one hand, and takes it away on the other; and the state of potential energy means the condition of the bob during the instant at which the energy, conferred by the hammering during the one half-arc, has just been exhausted by the hammering during the other half-arc. It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.
The doctrine of the conservation of energy which I have endeavored to illustrate is thus defined by the late Clerk Maxwell: 'The total energy of any body or system of bodies is a quantity which can neither be increased nor diminished by any mutual action of such bodies, though it may be transformed into any one of the forms of which energy is susceptible.'” source

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