The case is illustrated by the latter-day history of theoretical physics. Of the sciences which affect a non-committal attitude in respect of the concept of efficiency and which claim to get along with the notion of mathematical function alone, physics is the most outspoken and the one in which the claim has the best _prima facie_ validity. At the same time, latter-day physicists, for a hundred years or more, have been much occupied with explaining how phenomena which to all appearance involve action at a distance do not involve action at a distance at all. The greater theoretical achievements of physics during the past century lie within the sweep of this (metaphysical) principle that action at a distance does not take place, that apparent action at a distance must be explained by effective contact, through a continuum, or by a material transference. But this principle is nothing better than an unreasoning repugnance on the part of the physicists to admitting action at a distance. The requirement of a continuum involves a gross form of the concept of efficient causation. The "functional" concept, concomitant variation, requires no contact and no continuum. Concomitance at a distance is quite as simple and convincing a notion as concomitance within contact or by the intervention of a continuum, if not more so. What stands in the way of its acceptance is the irrepressible anthropomorphism of the physicists. And yet the great achievements of physics are due to the initiative of men animated with this anthropomorphic repugnance to the notion of concomitant variation at a distance. All the generalisations on undulatory motion and translation belong here. The latter-day researches in light, electrical transmission, the theory of ions, together with what is known of the obscure and late-found radiations and emanations, are to be credited to the same metaphysical preconception, which is never absent in any "scientific" inquiry in the field of physical science. It is only the "occult" and "Christian" "Sciences" that can dispense with this metaphysical postulate and take recourse to "absent treatment."