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lebrated Dr. Samuel Clarke. It appears in the first edi- 

 tion of his Sermons, in I7O6; and, more explicit!}', in his 

 several replies to Dr. Joseph Butler, in 1713, and his cor- 

 respondence with the celebrated Leibnitz, in 1715, as I 

 shall presently mention; and was, also, long before, ob- 

 scurely hinted by many of the scholastics. In the mean 

 time, that is about the year I69O, Leibnitz proposed a 

 new system, namely, that of Monads, or simple substances 

 absolutely unextended, but from whose disposition or or- 

 der, with respect to each other, the appearance of space 

 resulted. A system, so ingenious and well connected, that, 

 for many years, it met the approbation of the most di- 

 stinguished philosophers in Germany, and the admiration 

 •of the rest of Europe. 



A few years after, Mr. Locke published his inestimable 

 Essay on the Human Understanding; yet, his sentiments, 

 concerning space, are confusedly and rather inconsistently 

 stated. For, first, without giving any definition of space, 

 he divides it into solid, and empty. He tells us, we ac- 

 quire the idea of the first, when we conceive it so taken 

 up, by a solid substance, as to exclude all other solid 

 substances, and hinder two other bodies, moving towards 

 each other in a straight line, from coming into contact 

 with each other. — But, if "we conceive two bodies, at a 

 distance, to approach each other, without touching or dis- 

 placing any solid thing, until their surfaces come to meet, 

 we thus acquire the idea of space without solidity, or 

 pure space. Lib. II. cap. iv. §. 2, 3. And (§. 5,) he adds, 



" the 



