164 Me WEDGWOOD, ON THE KNOWLEDGE 



will give experience of space, while the sense of touch will give witness to the continued 

 presence of bodily surface. The coexistence of Space and bodily Surface, or lateral extension 

 of Surface, will thus be known by actual experience, and the notion of Body will be completed 

 as occupying space both in breadth and depth. 



Having thus succeeded in tracing step by step the course of experience terminating in the 

 actual apprehension of space by the exercise of faculties whose operation is well understood, it 

 might seem superfluous to turn back to a priori arguments against the possibility of an empi- 

 rical origin of the idea. There are, however, two objections taken on so high a ground and on 

 which so much stress has been laid, that it will be worth while to meet them with a direct 

 answer instead of trusting to the practical refutation of the foregoing investigation. 



It is said that experience is conversant only with the limited and the finite, and is 

 therefore necessarily incapable of giving rise to the knowledge of that infinitude which is an 

 essential attribute of space. It should, however, be borne in mind that the knowledge derived 

 from the exercise of the senses is not confined within the limits of actual or even possible 

 experience. We have seen that the sense of resistance gives rise to the conception of the space 

 pervading the substance of the resisting body, which can by no possibility be known by actual 

 apprehension. 



When once the infant has attained to the conception of space, the mode in which he obtains 

 the knowledge of distances beyond the immediate reach of his limbs may easily be understood. 

 He learns by degrees his power of transferring his entire body from place to place and gradually 

 forms a more and more extensive notion of the world in which he lives. He has only to 

 imagine the continuance of action with which he is familiar in order to conceive the extension 

 of space in any given direction to an indefinite distance, and when we seek for the utmost limits 

 to which such extension can be carried, we find that the only positive obstacle to the continued 

 experience of space of which we can conceive the possibility is the occurrence of a bodily 

 obstacle. But the imagination, as we have seen, on the occurrence of bodily resistance supplies 

 us with the notion of ulterior space in the direction in which we are prevented from pursuing 

 our experience, and thus we are driven to the conception of space stretching away in all 

 directions around us without limit, and further conception of infinity than this can be enter- 

 tained by no one. 



Again it is said that we can conceive the destruction of all the bodies in the universe but 

 not the destruction of a single particle of space, and so great a difference is this distinction 

 supposed to imply between the ideas of body and space, as to give rise to the assumption that 

 they must be derived from fundamentally different principles in the understanding. The idea 

 of body it is said is contingent ; it involves an object which may or may not be given in actual 

 existence, while space, being a thing of which it is impossible to conceive the non-existence 

 constitutes the subject of a necessary idea; and hence it is concluded the notion of space must 

 have a deeper-seated origin in the constitution of the mind than simple experience. I confess 

 I see no connexion whatever between the premises and the conclusion in the foregoing syllogism. 

 For how does it appear a priori that such an origin as that attributed by Cousin to the idea of 

 space should render it impossible to conceive the destruction of the thing conceived ? 



Moreover the necessity of the idea of space (understanding thereby the impossibility of 



