.1, S48 AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING SPACE. universe ? What do we intend by it, but that beyond this world of bodies there is no matter or body existing, yet matter or body may be introduced where there is an emptiness or ab- sence of it. Is emptiness indivisible? By no means ; fora wall or cur- tain hungup in an empty room divides it into two lesser voids or emptinesses, i. e. there is an emptiness or absence of body on both sides of the partition. Is emptiness self-existent ? Not at all ; for it bath no real existence : it is rather a negation of being. It is necessarily existent ? No surely ; for it loses what existence it is supposed to have when body or matter is introduced, as shade or dark- ness loses what existence it appeared to have when light breaks in. Yet a little further may this parallel be illustrated, in order to shew how much analogy there is between space and shade. Take a hollow sphere of lead, out of which all air is supposed to be excluded ; place it on a bright day in the midst of sun- beams ; here is a globe of space, and a globe of shade or dark- ness commensurate, and, if you please, co-extended with each other, and both included in this sphere; move it swiftly, the shade and the space move with the same swiftness ; stop the sphere, and the space and shade are at rest ; bruise it inwardly, and you alter the figure both of theshade and the space included ; for you annihilate a segment both of space and shade: break a hole into this globe, and immediately you admit both light and air, which are bodies, to fill up the room of space and shade ; and thus both the shade and the space are annihilated or nullified together. Here are then, or here appear to be, two co- extended and commensurate globes of figured and moveable I know not what's absolutely destroyed and nullified in a moment ; but per- haps the whole mystery of it is no more than this, that the non- entity of each of them ceases by the introduction, of real being or matter. SECT. XI, 14n Objection against the Nihility- of Space, answered. AFTER all some person may say, but. howwill you an- swer that great objection, viz. space cannot be mere nothing, for two bodies may have twenty miles of space between them, and yet if all this space be nothing, then there is nothing between these two bodies, and therefore they are close together or touch one another, and yet are twenty miles distant, which is im- possible ? But may not this be answered by a round denial of this proposition, " If there be nothingbetween them, then they touch or are clase together ?" Why may not two bodies be created or
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