which is at bottom Hume’s, that the last feeling in the process of diminution before such sensible space disappears (being the ‘minimum visibile’) is the least possible portion of space. [1] P. 374. [Book I, part III., sec. I.] [2] Above, par. 258. With Hume idea of vacuum impossible, but logically not more so than that of space. 278. Just as that reduction of consciousness to feeling, which really excludes the idea of quantity altogether, is by Hume only recognised as incompatible with its infinite divisibility, so it is not recognised as extinguishing space altogether, but only space as a vacuum. If it be true, he says, ‘that the idea of space is nothing but the idea of visible or tangible points distributed in a certain order, it follows that we can form no idea of vacuum, or space where there is nothing visible or tangible’. [1] Here as elsewhere the acceptability of his statement lies in its being taken in a sense which according to his principles cannot properly belong to it. It is one doctrine that the ideas of space and body are essentially correlative, and quite another that the idea of space is equivalent to a feeling of sight or touch. It is of the latter doctrine that Hume’s denial of a vacuum is the corollary; but it is the former that gains acceptance for this denial in the mind of his reader. Space we have already spoken of as the relation of externality. If, abstracting this relation from the world of which it is the uniform but most elementary determination, we regard it as a relation between objects having no other determination, these become spaces and nothing but spaces--space pure and simple, _vacuum_. But we have known the world in confused fulness before we detach its constituent relations in the clearness of unreal abstraction. We have known bodies συγκεχυμένος [2], before we think their limits apart and out of these construct a world of pure space. It is thus in a sense true that in the development of our consciousness an idea of body precedes that of space, though the _abstraction_ of space--the detachment of the relation so-called from the real complex of relations--precedes that of body; and it is this fact that, in the face of geometry, strengthens common sense in its position that an idea of vacuum is impossible. It is not, however, the inseparability of space from body whether in reality or for our consciousness, but its identity with a certain sort of feeling, that is implied in Hume’s exclusion of the idea of vacuum. ‘Body,’ as other than feeling, is with him as much a fiction as vacuum. That there can be no idea of vacuum, is thus in fact merely his negative way of putting that proposition of which the positive form is, that space is a compound impression of sight and touch. Having examined that proposition in the positive, we need not examine it again in the negative form. It will be more to the purpose to enquire whether the ‘tendency to suppose’ or ‘propensity to feign’