Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/305

 distance, which, moreover, must necessarily happen in force will become weaker in inverse proportion—yet, inasmuch as smaller degrees of every moving force are possible to infinity, it cannot contain the ground for their ever ceasing. Matter then, by its repulsive force alone (which contains the ground of its impenetrability), and if no other opposing force contradicted this, would be held within no boundaries of extension, that is, would dissipate itself to infinity, and no assignable quantity of matter would be met with in any assignable space. With merely repulsive forces of matter, all spaces would consequently be empty, in other words no matter would properly speaking exist at all. To the existence of all matters, forces opposed to the extending [forces], in other words, compressive forces, are requisite. But these again cannot be sought for originally, in the opposition of another matter, for it requires, in order that it may be matter, itself a compressive force. An original force of matter, working in an opposite direction to the repulsive, in other words [a force] of approach, that is, an attractive force must be assumed. Now as this attractive force belongs to the possibility of a matter, as matter generally, consequently precedes all distinctions of the same, it must not be ascribed merely to a special species [of matter], but to every matter generally and originally. An original attraction then belongs to all matter as a fundamental force pertaining to its essence.

Observation.

With this transition from one property of matter to another specifically different from it, which yet equally belongs to the conception of matter, although it is not contained therein, the attitude of our understanding must be more closely considered. If attractive force be itself originally requisite to the possibility of matter, why do we not equally make use of it with impenetrability as the primary sign of a matter? why is the last immediately given with the conception of a matter, while the first is not thought in the conception, but only attributed to it, by inference? That our senses do not allow us to perceive attraction so immediately as repulsion and the resistance