SPACE (OF.. Fr. espaee. from Lat. spatium, space: connected with sees, hope, ()Church Slay. spi'ti. to result. Lith. speti, to have leisure, AS. ORG., shoran, to succeed, Skt. Aphny, to fatten). A term denoting the physical basis for dimension and magnitude. From ancient times it has occupied a large place in philosophical dis cussions. Parmenides and Plato make it equiva lent to non-being. Leueippus. on the contrary, recognizes its reality. Space of course is presup posed as a fundamental reality in all material istic atomism. Aristotle defines place as limit, thereby committing himself to the denial of empty space. In modern philosophy the nature of space is one of the central questions. Des cartes considered it one of time two attributes of reality. and Spinoza followed him in making it one of the two known attributes. Leibnitz can not recognize space as an original attribute of his monads, else they become material and not spiritual. Space is therefore only the order of possible coexistent phenomena of sense. When thought clarifies away the obscurities of sense space is no longer left as a relation in which realities stand to each other. Natural science, however, and materialism have vigorously main tained the ultimate reality of space. Berkeley practically. reduces space to time and Hume makes it the disposition of colored points. Kant taught that space is a form of perception; phe nomena appear in space simply because the mind gives them a local habitation, and, lie argues, we may not say that things in themselves are spa tial. He tries to prove the a priori character of space from its inevitableness in our experience; and according to his view whatever is a priori must be of subjective origin. Hegel regards it as 'the first or immediate characteristic of nature,' and yet it is an abstract characteristic, not an independent entity. At the present time there are advocates of almost all theories that have in the past been broached. There are transcenden talists (Kantians) ; there are realists, who attribute an independent reality to space as if it were a vessel to be filled with objects; there are those who believe that our idea of space is so full of contradictions that it has no ultimate value; and there are those who believe it is a real quality of experienced objects and a real rela tion between such objects, but who refuse to attribute to it an existence entirely apart from the objects it qualifies or correlates. The last
mentioned view seems to be in closer agreement with the facts than any of the others. According to this view pure space is an abstraction having no actual existence. Space is always in experi ence the figure of some object or the distance between some objects, or in some way an attribufte or a relation, not a self-existent thing. The question of the origin of our spatial ideas is psychological. A question that has always been much mooted is that as to the finitude or the infinity of space. Kant tried to cut the Gordian knot by denying the reality of space as a thing in itself. whereby he thought to be able to say that the whole trouble was removed. Space is, therefore, for Kant neither infinite nor finite, but there is no limit to our power to produce space. It is indefinitely producible. Taking, however, the view that space is a real but not an independent element in the objective world, the question as to the infinity of space becomes one to be answered only on the basis of induction (q.v.) : and. if we may judge from past experi ence. we should say that there is no definite indication that experienceable spatial objects are limited. But the data are not sufficient fora dogmatic judgment. But even if an end of pereeptible objects were found imagination would add further objects, and thus remove the lim its, See Baumann, Die Lehre coo Raum, Zcit vad Mat bea! filo in der AC lien Philosophic (Ber lin, 1868-69) ; Deichmann, Das Problem des Bunnies in der griechisehen Philosophic his Aris adelcs (Leipzig, 1893) ; Hodgson,' Time and Space (London, 1865) ; Lechalas, Etude sur l'cspaee et In temps (Paris, 1896) ; Saleta, Ex pos(' sommairc de Iid'oe arespaec (ib.,1872): also consult the metaphysical works of Kant, Hegel, Lotze. Bradley, Boyne, 1101/11011SC.