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1907-8.] SPACE AND Its DiMENsIONS. 319 
that this unperceived thing is like those phenomena has no sense at 
all; it means the same as saying ‘‘a thing is what it is not.””’ What mean- 
ing, for instance, could it have to say a surface was green apart from any 
consciousness? ‘The socalled primary qualities are just as subjective as the 
secondary. There is, as Wundt has shown, no need for duplicating the 
world by dividing everything into a thing in itself, and a presentation of 
the thing. 
2. SPACE IS RELATIVE. 
I¥ vou ask less educated people how big the moon appears to them, 
you will receive all kinds of answers. One will say, it looks as large as 
a ten cent piece, another as large as a plate, another as large as a carriage 
wheel, etc. These people do not realize that their decisions mean noth- 
ing; they all are equally right and equally wrong, for you can hold a dine, 
just as well as a plate or a wagon wheel in such a distance that it just covers 
the size of the disk of the moon. The only way of determining the appar-- 
ent size of an object is by stating in degrees the size of its visual angle. 
That we are usually able to state to some extent correctly in terms of 
feet and yards the sizes of terrestrial objects is due to the fact that we 
tacitly refer to a certain more or less definite normal distance. Whenever 
we measure with a yard stick, or with feet and inches, or with a chain, 
we always have a standard which itself is either not measured, or which 
is measured by a smaller unmeasured standard. Thus our statements 
about the magnitude of things are relative, they really never give an 
absolute size, but they always say a thing is so and so many times larger 
than another one. ‘The only occasion where we apparently measure with- 
out a standard is, in case of continuous magnitudes when we express the 
quantity in terms of degrees, i.e., fractions of a great circle in the vision- 
field; and in case of aggregations of discrete things, when we count the 
objects. But in counting, the unity is arbitrary and the expression in 
degrees is the archetype of relative measurement, it does not say anything 
about absolute magnitudes. Nowhere in the world have we a possibility 
of absolute measurement; all quantities are relative, and if we regard 
space as a quantity, which we are entitled, though not compelled to do, 
this law of relativity applies to space also. All magnitudes in space and 
all movements too are relative. We have no right to say a thing is 
absolutely at rest or in motion. When we say that a thing has moved 
from one point of space to. another point, that means that the 
space relations, distances, etc., between that thing and all other things 
have been changed in a certain way. Whether the thing itself has 
moved or whether all other things have been correspondingly dis- 
located in the opposite direction, cannot. possibly be said. In fact, there 
