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nydus/An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1Public

John Locke presents a philosophical treatise dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. The work explores the nature of human understanding and advocates for the objective examination of new ideas regardless of their departure from established doctrines.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER XIII. COMPLEX IDEAS OF SIMPLE MODES:—AND FIRST, OF THE SIMPLE MODES OF IDEA OF SPACE.

a consequence from the supposition of plenitude; which will therefore need some better proof than a supposed matter of fact, which experiment can never make out;—our own clear and distinct ideas plainly satisfying that there is no necessary connexion between space and solidity, since we can conceive the one without the other. And those who dispute for or against a vacuum, do thereby confess they have distinct IDEAS of vacuum and plenum, i. e. that they have an idea of extension void of solidity, though they deny its EXISTENCE; or else they dispute about nothing at all. For they who so much alter the signification of words, as to call extension body, and consequently make the whole essence of body to be nothing but pure extension without solidity, must talk absurdly whenever they speak of vacuum; since it is impossible for extension to be without extension. For vacuum, whether we affirm or deny its existence, signifies space without body; whose very existence no one can deny to be possible, who will not make matter infinite, and take from God a power to annihilate any particle of it.

  1. Motion proves a Vacuum.
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