ich I am not now specially concerned with. It sufficiently illustrates
the limitation of our knowledge by our sensibilities, from the nature of
space, to fasten attention on the double and mutually supplementing
experience of Matter and Void; the one resisting movement, and giving
the consciousness of resistance, or dead strain, the other permitting
movement, and giving the consciousness of the unobstructed sweep of the
limbs or members. Whatever else may be in space, this freedom to move,
to soar, to expatiate (in contrast to being hemmed in, obstructed, held
fast), is an essential part of the conception, and is formed out of our
active or moving sensibilities. Now, as far as movement is concerned, we
must be in one of two states;--we must be putting forth energy without
effecting movement, being met by obstacles called matter; or we must be
putting forth energy unresisted and effecting movement, which is what we
mean by empty space. There is no third position in the matter of putting
forth our active energy. Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there
is space; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter.
We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a
certain number and range of these two alternations; in other words, free
spaces and resisting barriers. And we can, by the constructive power
already mentioned, imagine other proportions of the two experiences; we
can imagine the scope for movement, the absence of obstruction, to be
enlarged more and more, to be counted by thousands and millions of
miles; but the only terminus or boundary that we can imagine is
resistance, a dead obstacle. We are able to conceive the starry spaces
widened and prolonged from galaxy to galaxy through enormous strides of
increasing amplitude, but when we try to think an end to this career, we
can think only of a dead wall. There is no other end of space within the
grasp of our faculties; and that termination is not an end of extension;
for we know that solid matter, viewed in other ways than as obstructing
movement, has the same property of the extended belonging to the empty
void. The inference is, that the limitation of our means of knowledge
renders altogether incompetent the imagination of an end to either Time
or Space. The greatest efforts of our combining faculty cannot exceed
the elements presented to it, and these elements contain nothing that
would set forth the situation of space ending, and o