SPACE 37 



our direction-signs. The space of the direction-signs is, in 

 its very nature, a magnitude of motion, whereas the object- 

 less offers us the absolute calm that we are forever seeking 

 behind all motion. 



The objectless is not the form of the direction-signs, 

 but of pure local signs, — i.e. it is the extended. 



The absolutely motionless, extended objectless is not 

 nothingness, for nothingness has no extension ; it corre- 

 sponds rather to the Buddhist's Nirvana. It is invisible and 

 non-apprehensible, yet of necessity always present, and it has 

 immense value as " atmosphere," since it serves as back- 

 ground for all form and all motion, a background towards 

 which the seeking eye ever strives. 



The extended is always felt to be the same distance away, 

 and so it serves as a fixed basis from which our eye can 

 estimate the magnitudes of space. When we look around us 

 at a varied landscape, the horizon and the sky which rises up 

 from it seem on different sides to be set at very different 

 distances from us. Sometimes the difference in the distance 

 is so great that we imagine the whole sky must be gathered 

 into folds. 



When we ask how it comes that, on one side the horizon 

 is so near, and, on the other so far away, we can prove to 

 ourselves that this difference lies in the object-signs being 

 relatively few or many. 



Every traveller must have noticed that a high snow- 

 peak seen from afar over a wide^plain seems relatively small, 

 and he surveys all its foot-hills and narrow valleys as though 

 they were mere ridges and cracks in the mountain-base If 

 he goes away from the mountain and follows up a narrow 

 valley, the snow-peak begins to rise up above him to un- 

 suspected heights. 



In Naples I have often been much struck by noticing that 

 Vesuvius, as seen in its full extent across that incomparable 



