This general way of thinking was called Rationalism. Kant ordinarily calls it Dogmatism. It was attacked by other scientists for its view of the nature of space and time. No one who reflects at all can fail to distinguish a difference between the way in which we see the truth of a geometrical proposition--that, _e.g._, the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles--and the way in which we judge that such and such a figure drawn on a board is a triangle, or make judgments about the way in which things are actually arranged in space or succeed in time. Judgments of the latter kind involve words like "here" and "there," "now" and "then," words which are all a kind of pointing. It seems impossible from considering the nature of a triangle to deduce why any existing thing should be called triangular, and all statements about the position of things in space and time seem to be derived not from a consideration of the general nature of space and time, but from observation. Now the science which had made perhaps the most striking progress in the time we are speaking of, physical astronomy, involved any number of statements about the position of bodies in space. The Rationalist school admitted this, but held that that was due to the fact that science was not sufficiently thought out. In time, they hoped, all statements about position in space would disappear. To think of things in spatial order was to think confusedly. Newton, on the other hand, held that space could not be explained away, that astronomy implied an absolute space in which things existed, that the spatial relations of things could not be explained by the nature of the things themselves, but only by a reference to absolute space in which they all were. This meant that observation or perception was something of which you could not hope and should not wish to get rid, and that an ideal of knowledge in which all applied mathematics should have been transmuted into pure mathematics was a vain one. Astronomy implied both mere observation and apprehension of necessary relations. Here was a science which seemed to employ both methods together. Galileo, in fact could not have made his discovery without observation but men had observed bodies falling for ages without discovering the laws of motion. Further, the laws of motion, once discovered, made men in some degree independent of observation, made them able to say of actual concrete things not only what had happened, but what must happen.