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A critique is directed at the use of abstract entities--such as fields--in electromagnetism, in particular the need to resort to imaginary closed circuits when applying Faraday's Law. It is suggested that a corrected direct action-at-a-distance scheme that considers retardation effects within a certain approximation, as deduced by Ritz and reviewed by O'Rahilly, is a plausible alternative which is firmly anchored in physical grounds. As an application we show how this direct action approach can be used, without resort to non-existing entities, to calculate the potential difference between the extremities of a metallic bar moving in a uniform magnetic field and where the reference frame is fixed with respect to the bar.