negation, and unity and infinity are negations of a negation--that is, they are predicates of nothing. "Negative notions" must be predicates of _something_, otherwise they are a mere negation or absence of thought, and convey absolutely no knowledge. We may, if we please, assert with Hegel, that "Nothing is the same as Being," and then amuse ourselves with making affirmations concerning vacuity, nihility, and unreality to the disgrace of philosophy; but the common-sense of mankind will repudiate our absurdities. We can not think about nothing; all thought must be positive. Thought must have an object, and that object must be either an entity, or the attribute of an entity, or a relation between entities. If pure space is regarded as "_absolute vacuity_"--pure nothing--then we may readily dispose of the argument on which Prof. Stewart relies with so much confidence. "Divine omnipotence can not annihilate space,"[73] therefore it must be an independent reality. We have simply to answer--the notion of annihilating nihility is an absurdity and a contradiction. There is nothing to be annihilated, and Omnipotence even must be inadequate to the annihilation of nothing. If, with Leibnitz, Lord Monboddo, Calderwood, and many modern physicists,[74] we reject the notion of "absolute vacuity"--infinite space--and regard space as a _relation_--the relation of position, distance, direction--then, like all the quantitive relations of mathematics, it may be regarded as conditionally necessary--that is, bodies being given, they must necessarily have place, distance, and direction.[75] Space as a necessary relation is a reality, but a reality which is conditioned and conditional, and "God is the all-mighty cause of space." If all bodies were annihilated, there would be no position, no distance, no direction, and consequently space would be annihilated. There would remain nothing but the timeless, spaceless, Infinite One, who is the efficient cause of all existence, all qualities, and all relations. This, again, would be a sufficient answer to the sophism of Dr. Clark, quoted and indorsed by Stewart--"God can not annihilate the space in this room!" Annihilate the room, and the relative space in the room is no more--that is, the distance between the inclosing walls. Of "pure space" apart from the relations of bodies we have no conception, can have no conception; for to annihilate all bodies, in thought, we must annihilate our own body, and to a disembodied spirit there can be no _here_ and no _there_. Place is a relation belonging to extension, and extension is a property of matter only.[76]