ESSAY I. 313 Math it not also ten thousand shapes or figures Q Let me hold up my hand or any other object between the. sun and the wall, bath not the shadow what shape I please to give it, and what motion I please to excite in the thing which is represented by the shadow? Now it is plain, that all these seem to be real proper- ties, and the powers of a real being. . And as it has these seeming properties and powers, which make mankindready to fancy it a real being, so some of the pro- perties of it seem to be infinite also. Is not darkness extended beyond the utmost bounds of the material creation ? Is there not some real limit to the flight of the utmost wandering star- beam ? If not, then the material world is infinite ; for star- beams and light are matter : If there be a limit to light, then all beyond this limit and these wandering beams is pure darkness, and this darkness is unlimited and infinite. May not a thousand new lights, new stars, or planetary worlds, be: created in this immense darkness? Has it not capacityto contain them all, and yet again to stretch itself infinitelybeyond the bounds of this new creation ? We can no more assign the limits of it, than we can the limits of space *. Again, As darkness bath a seeming immen- sity belonging to it, has it not an eternity also ?. Was not darkness eternal before light was ever formed or the first beam of it created ? And yet after all these sportings of the imagination, which seem to assign real properties and powers to shadows and dark- ness, and even to stretch them to an infinite extent, we know and are sure that darkness or a shadow is a mere nothing : It it only a privation or absence of light : Inproper speech it has no being :. And philosophers are able to give an exact and rational account how all these appearances aremade by the presence or absence of light, without allowing a shadow to be a real being, or to have in reality any powers or properties at all. And perhaps in this present state we are deluded with the seeming properties ofspace, as much as we are with the seeming properties of shadow : And though I grant the parallel be not perfectlyexact in all respects, yet in several respects they are so much a-kin, that in reality space' may be nothing but the absence of body, as shade is the absence of light : And both may be capable of explication by philosophy, without supposing the one or the other of them to be real beings. SECT. IX.Space inactive and impassive. LET us try nowwhether we may not take courage from thi * I am sensible it will be objected here, that it is" space," not oa darkness,' the. has the capacity of receiving or admitting light orsun-beams. But it may be repl is ed, that though it is space that admits new body to exist there, yet it is darknea; that does as it were join with space, to admit the first beams of light there Darknessgives it a capacity of admitting that particular body called rt light¡ as much as space gives it a capacity of admitting body.
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