“Here we are, sir; this is the Embassy,” said Stanton. But Clide sat dumb, as if he were glued to the seat. At last, starting from his revery, he said “Home!” and flung himself back in the carriage.
“That fever has left him a bit queer,” thought Stanton, as he closed the door on his capricious master.
“What a fool’s errand it would be!” muttered Clide to himself; “and what have I to say to Lord X——? If it should turn out to be a case of mistaken identity.… The lawyer’s advice is after all the safest and the most rational.”
TO BE CONTINUED.
SPACE.
II.
It is of the utmost importance in the philosophical investigation in which we have engaged to bear in mind that the power by which we attain to the knowledge of the intrinsic nature of things is not our imagination, but our intellect. The office of imagination is to form sensible representations of what lies at the surface of the things apprehended; the intellect alone is competent to reach what lies under that surface, that is, the essential principles of the thing, and their ontological relations. This remark is so obvious that it may seem superfluous; but our imagination has such a power in fashioning our thoughts, and such an obtrusive manner of interfering with our mental processes, that we need to be reminded, in season and out of season, of our liability to mistake its suggestions for intellectual conceptions. What we have said about absolute space in our past article shows that even renowned philosophers are liable to such mistakes; for nothing but imagination could have led Balmes, Descartes, and many others, to confound absolute space with the material extension of bodies. As to relative space, the danger of confounding its intellectual notion with our sensible representation of it, is, perhaps, less serious, when we have understood the nature of absolute space; yet, here too we are obliged to guard against the incursions of the imaginative faculty, which will not cease to obtrude itself, in the shape of an auxiliary, upon our intellectual ground.
Absolute space cannot become relative unless it be extrinsically terminated, or occupied, by distinct terms. Hence, in passing from the consideration of absolute space to that of relative space, the first question by which we are met is the following:
Is absolute space intrinsically modified or affected by being occupied? or, Does the creation of a material point in space entail an intrinsic modification of absolute space?