Space

“ They passed, dispersed and swift about the entire landscape, a very part of it, diffused in terms of light and air and color, scattered in radiance, distributed through flowers, spread through the sky and grass and forests. Space is a form of thought. ”

“ Space heaves a deeper breath. She is traversed by currents, scoops of darkness, aromatic whiffs. The perfume sweetens the lips; flowers must be dotting this hedge. And suddenly space goes mad. A black wind swirls down from the tree-tops and fills the nocturnal expanse with the creaking of branches.
Must we stop at the greatest moment, at the point where the road looks supernatural, as though it possessed a density of its own and were suspended in space?... I should have liked to walk further; one never goes far enough. Must we really return to the stolid lamp and babbling kisses? ”

“ Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.” ”

“ Imagine the vast space to be void of ether and the subtle seeds of creation. Perfect stillness reigns supreme over the ocean of universal space, beginningless and endless. What supports it? It is supportless, soundless, cloudless. ”

“ Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way. A space we measure by pacing appears longer than one we traverse with no thought of its length. And in general an amount of space attended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spaciousness than one of which we only note the content. ”

“ We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. ”

“ The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. ”

“ What you call Solid things are really superficial; what you call Space is really nothing but a great Plane. I am in Space, and look down upon the insides of the things of which you only see the outsides. ”

“ What has space or time to do with being? Can distance destroy fact? What if one day the chain of gravity were to break, and, starting from the edge of the pine wood, we fared or flew farther and farther towards the bars of gold and rose and green! ”

“ No matter how vast may be the depth which our instruments have sounded, there is yet a beyond of infinite extent. Imagine a mighty globe described in space, a globe of such stupendous dimensions that it shall include the sun and his system, all the stars and nebulæ, and even all the objects which our finite capacities can imagine. ”

“ Within the great circle of the heavens, the earth, revolving upon its axis and gliding along its orbit, is but as a very small wheel in the great machinery of the fathomless and limitless universe, while to our short range of view it appears great and wonderful above all others of the worlds which float in the immensity of space. ”

“ He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers,—shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems,—the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness. ”

“ How does it deal with infinite space as something singular which comprehends both picture and spectator as mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way. ”

“ Rather does the whole fabric of experience lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the solar system, including many relative positions, leans, for its absolute position in space, on any one of its constituent stars. ”

“ When space is curved, and the cosmos is sphere within sphere, and the way from any one point to any other point is round the bend of the inevitable, that turns as the tips of the broad wings of the hawk turn upwards, leaning upon the air like the invisible half of the ellipse. ”

“ Again, imagine our earth, a point in this system, shooting through universal space at the rate of a falling star, and rotating on its axis from morning to night, from night to morning—"mountain and sea borne along in the ever-rapid course of the spheres." ”

“ First comes the immense surrounding space—a space measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of at least fifty miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque beauty, including distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines, circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or memory may linger. ”

“ In point of space the object is larger and richer than any of the individual objects in nature which are beautiful and interesting in themselves. The varying forms of the clouds and the water, the outline of the blue mountains in the background, the woods and meadows in the middle-distance, and the living figures in the foreground, excite in the mind of the spectator a number of different impressions which are woven together into a harmonious whole by a most elaborate association of ideas. ”

“ He contemplated the space, infinite in the eyes of men, that is filled with the groups of worlds, of which a small number are registered by our telescopes, while its immensity is proved by the rapidity of light. ”

“ BY speaking of space as an Idea, I intend to imply, as has already been stated, that the apprehension of objects as existing in space, and of the relations of position, &c., prevailing among them, is not a consequence of experience, but a result of a peculiar constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise. ”

“ Let a vast sphere be described of such mighty dimensions that it embraces not only all the objects visible to the unaided eye, not only all the objects visible in our most powerful telescopes, but even every object that the most fertile imagination can conceive, what relation must this stupendous sphere bear to the whole of space? The mighty sphere can only be an infinitely small part of space. ”

“ I shall begin with the simple idea of SPACE. I have showed above, chap. 4, that we get the idea of space, both by our sight and touch; which, I think, is so evident, that it would be as needless to go to prove that men perceive, by their sight, a distance between bodies of different colours, or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours themselves: nor is it less obvious, that they can do so in the dark by feeling and touch. ”

“ When I say that there is space in our percepts, I mean nothing at all difficult to understand. I mean—to take the sense of sight, which is the most important in this connection—that in what we see at one time there is up and down, right and left, inside and outside. ”

“ "'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.' ”

“ Thus space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open. ”

“ And when I say that space had been annexed to science by astronomy, it was really only that half of space which extends from the standpoint of the human senses in the direction of the infinitely great. ”

“ Space is the region which is, or may be, occupied by body, and which affords it an opportunity of moving freely. That there are bodies in the universe is attested by the senses. That there is also space is evident; since otherwise bodies would have no place in which to move or exist, and of their existence and motion we have the certain proof of perception. ”

“ But space is only an intuition for us; and even for us not primo loco an intuition of an infinite magnitude of extension, but—stated accurately—only the mental representation of that coherent system of places which appertain to the different real elements, by virtue of their supersensible relations to one another in our intuition. ”

“ Space must, therefore, be, as we have said, not a general conception abstracted from particulars, but a universal mode of representation, altogether independent of experience.
2. Space is infinite. We represent it to ourselves as an infinitely great magnitude. Such an idea as that of Likeness or Cause, is, no doubt, found in an infinite number of particular cases, and so far includes these cases. But these ideas do not include an infinite number of cases as parts of an infinite whole. ”

“ In itself, space is conceived as unchanging from eternity to eternity, and as homogeneous from infinity to infinity. Thus, we compose a straightforward characterization of Nature, which is consonant to common sense, and can be verified at each moment of our existence. ”

“ We showed that space is an idea of the mind, or form of our perceiving power, independent of experience, by pointing out that we possess necessary and universal truths concerning the relations of space, which could never be given by means of experience; but of which the necessity is readily conceivable, if we suppose them to have for their basis the constitution of the mind. ”

“ Space is the relation of various limited beings among themselves. It exists. But time is only the relation of the movement of living beings among themselves, and the movement of matter which we consider dead. ”

“ To the second head of argument I answer,—space is a property [or mode] of the self-existent substance, but not of any other substances. All other substances are in space, and are penetrated by it; but the self-existent substance is not in space, nor penetrated by it, but is itself (if I may so speak) the substratum of space, the ground of the existence of space and duration itself. ”

“ Space is the form of the external sense, by means of which objects are given to us as existing outside of ourselves separately and conjointly; time is the form of the inner sense, by means of which the circumstances of our own soul-life become objects to our consciousness. ”

“ The doctrine, however, which presents our conception of Space as discovered in our activity amid resistant transmutation-processes not only establishes its ideality but at the same time explains the relation which its form nevertheless bears to the objective material laws of the sensible presentation. It liberates the mind from the oppressive necessity of regarding Space as still somehow objectively extending and containing the real world. ”

“ We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? ”

“ It is a long way from these facts of perception, which the brutes share with us, to that scientific concept of space as having three dimensions and no qualitative differences which we have elaborated by the aid of thought and language, and which reason may see to be the logical presupposition of what in the order of mental development has chronologically preceded it. That the experience of space is not psychologically original seems obvious—quite apart from any successful explanation of its origin from the mere consideration of its complexity. ”

“ Here, too, it becomes apparent that space as we imagine it, and as we carry it with us as a concept for arranging our sense-impressions, cannot correspond to the true reality. As in regard to time, so also in regard to space, we can never after any distance however enormous come to a halt and say, “Here is the end of space.” ”

“ Opinions of Philosophers about Space.—Space is usually defined “a capacity of bodies,” and is styled “full” when a body actually occupies that capacity, “void,” or “empty,” when no body is actually present in it. Again, a space which is determined by the presence of a body, and limited by its limits, is called “real,” whilst the space which is conceived to extend beyond the limits of all existing bodies is called “imaginary.”
Whether this definition and division of space is as correct as it is common, we shall examine hereafter. ”

“ We have the idea of space, on it is based a certain and evident science, that of geometry; this idea is also necessary for the conception of motion. A pure nothing cannot be the object which corresponds to this idea.
Is space something distinct from the extension of bodies? It is objected to the opinion which maintains this, that space must be either body or spirit, and if not body it must be spirit, which is absurd, since that which is essentially composed of parts, as space is, cannot be a spirit, which is a simple being. ”

“ The Idea of Space is not derived from experience, for experience of external objects presupposes bodies to exist in Space, Space is a condition under which the mind receives the impressions of sense, and therefore the relations of space are necessarily and universally true of all perceived objects. Space is a form of our perceptions, and regulates them, whatever the matter of them may be. ”