352 AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING SPACE. APPENDIX. ABOUT the time the second editition was published I had four treatises put into my hands, wherein the notion of space is at large debated, which is the subject of this First Essay. When an important dispute is managed by persons of such ingenuity, and such acute reasoning powers as Mr. Jackson, Mr. Edmund Law, Mr. John and Mr. Joseph Clarke, I hope the result of their thoughts will be the investigation oftruth, and the esta blish. ment of it in the world ; lest while some suppose spaceto be true Godhead, and others make it a mere idea and nothing real, the atheists upbraid`us that we scarce know the difference between God and nothing. I owe my thanks to two of those gentlemen who think any light bath been thrown on this controversyby the speculations of my younger years : but my time now demands other employment, and I cheerfully leave this subject in such hands. Yet I ask leave to take notice that Mr. Joseph Clarke's distinction of a real and an ideal nothing will help to solve many difficulties in this debate, which are created merely by the per- plexity of language : and I cannot but approve of Mr. Law's remark, That a subject which in the minds of so many men either raises or occasions so many different and contradictory ideas or notions, bids fair to be a mere idea, and to have no real exist- owe. 1731.
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