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nydus/An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume IPublic
Page 239 of 490
Table of Contents

CHAPTER XV. IDEAS OF DURATION AND EXPANSION, CONSIDERED TOGETHER.

name, I know not whether I may be allowed to call a SENSIBLE POINT, meaning thereby the least particle of matter or space we can discern, which is ordinarily about a minute, and to the sharpest eyes seldom less than thirty seconds of a circle, whereof the eye is the centre.

  1. Their Parts inseparable.

Expansion and duration have this further agreement, that, though they are both considered by us as having parts, yet their parts are not separable one from another, no not even in thought: though the parts of bodies from whence we take our MEASURE of the one; and the parts of motion, or rather the succession of ideas in our minds, from whence we take the MEASURE of the other, may be interrupted and separated; as the one is often by rest, and the other is by sleep, which we call rest too.

  1. Duration is as a Line, Expansion as a Solid.

But there is this manifest difference between them,—That the ideas of length which we have of expansion are turned every way, and so make figure, and breadth, and thickness; but duration is but as it were the length of one straight line, extended in infinitum, not capable of multiplicity, variation, or figure; but is one common measure of all

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