Supplement to the Calculus of Operations. By John 

 Paterson, A.M. 



[Read before the Albany Institute, Nov. 3d, 1874.] 



Space and Time are the first and oldest things of the 

 terrestrial world. The child sees space in color, and veri- 

 fies it by the touch. Had Kant remembered the time when 

 he first saw space and verified it, he would have had no 

 occasion to assert its composition by the mind, and there- 

 fore would have had no doubt of the thing-in-itself ; and we 

 should not have been obliged to consider space and time 

 as innate. 



The mind certainly sees space in two dimensions. A 

 point is position without magnitude, and when prolonged 

 into a line, it is merely a division, and only imaginarily 

 visible. Assuming a perpendicular axis, the mind projects 

 its vision to a certain distance ; and rotating around this 

 axis entirely, the cylinder will be completed. Assuming 

 again a horizontal axis and rotating forward entirely, 

 another cylinder is completed ; and thus the whole of space 

 is included. Casting existences out of the way in every 

 direction, we see that space must be infinite in extent. 



Assuming a beginning in time, let the Sun be our first 

 station. At distances so great that light would require 

 thousands of years to reach us, the bodies we call fixed 

 stars are placed ; these are suns like ours. From the nadir 

 and zenith, from north and south, and from east and west, 

 with unequal densities and at unequal distances from each 

 other, the All-powerful and All-knowing Creator planted 

 material germs. These material germs emanated into space 

 in all directions. Certain limits, more or less approaching 



