gh evident only in the organized members of
animals, might yet be common to all individuals! The question being
reduced to this, it would have appeared that if, strictly speaking, it
is impossible to demonstrate that all bodies are absolutely insensible,
no man, unless instructed by a particular revelation, can decide the
question otherwise than by calculating and comparing the verisimilitude
of this opinion with that of the contrary...."

Instructed by the errors of great men who have gone before us, we should
be sensible that our observations, however multiplied and concentrated,
are scarcely sufficient to form one of those partial systems
comprehended in the general system; add that it is from the depth of
imagination that the several systems of the universe have hitherto
been drawn; and, as our informations of remote countries are always
imperfect, so the informations philosophers have of the system of
the world are also defective. With a great genius and a multitude of
combinations, the products of their labors will be only fictions till
time and chance shall furnish then? with a general fact, to which all
others may be referred.

"What I have said of the word Matter, I say also of Space. Most of the
philosophers have made a being of it; and the ignorance of the true
sense of the word has occasioned long disputes. They would have been
greatly shortened by annexing a clear idea to this word; for then the
sages would have agreed that Space, considered in bodies, is what we
call extension; that we owe the idea of a void, which partly composes
the idea of Space, to the interval seen betwixt two lofty mountains; an
interval which, being filled only by air, that is, by a body which at a
certain distance makes no sensible impression on us, must have given us
an idea of a vacuum; being nothing more than a power of representing
to ourselves mountains separated from each other, and the intervening
distances not being filled by other bodies. With regard to the idea of
Infinite, comprehended also within the idea of Space, I say that we owe
this idea of Infinite only to the power which a man standing on a plain
has of continually extending its limits, the boundary of his imagination
not being determinable: the absence of limits is therefore the only idea
we can form of Infinite. Had philosophers, previously to their giving
any opinion on this subject, determined the signification of the word
Infinite, I am inclined to believe