Classical literature; Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800
Neither must we forget that our idea of space, like our other ideas,
has a history. The Homeric poems contain no word for it; even the later
Greek philosophy has not the Kantian notion of space, but only the
definite 'place' or 'the infinite.' To Plato, in the Timaeus, it is
known only as the 'nurse of generation.' When therefore we speak of
the necessity of our ideas of space we must remember that this is a
necessity which has grown up with the growth of the human mind, and
has been made by ourselves. We can free ourselves from the perplexities
which are involved in it by ascending to a time in which they did not
as yet exist. And when space or time are described as 'a priori forms or
intuitions added to the matter given in sensation,' we should consider
that such expressions belong really to the 'pre-historic study' of
philosophy, i.e. to the eighteenth century, when men sought to explain
the human mind without regard to history or language or the social
nature of man.
In every act of sense there is a latent perception of space, of which
we only become conscious when objects are withdrawn from it. There are
various ways in which we may trace the connexion between them. We may
think of space as unresisting matter, and of matter as divided into
objects; or of objects again as formed by abstraction into a collective
notion of matter, and of matter as rarefied into space. And motion may
be conceived as the union of there and not there in space, and force
as the materializing or solidification of motion. Space again is the
individual and universal in one; or, in other words, a perception and
also a conception. So easily do what are sometimes called our simple
ideas pass into one another, and differences of kind resolve themselves
into differences of degree.
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