Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/365

 mutually relative predicate. Hence it is nothing belonging to the existence of things, but merely to the determination of the conception, and in so far no empty space exists. Empty space, in a dynamic sense, is that which is not filled, i.e., in which nothing else movable resists the penetration of the movable, consequently in which no repulsive force acts, and it may be either the empty space within the world (vacuum mundanum), or, if the latter be conceived as bounded, empty space outside the world (vacuum extramundanum); the first moreover, either as distributed (vacuum disseminatum), which constitutes only one portion of the volume of the matter, or as continuous empty space (vacuum coacervatum, which separates bodies, for instance, the heavenly bodies, from one another), a distinction which, inasmuch as it rests on the difference of places, assigned to empty space in the universe, is not essential, but is used in various ways; firstly, in order to deduce the specific difference of density, and secondly, in order [to deduce] the possibility of a movement in the universe, free from all external resistance. That empty space in the first sense is not necessary to be assumed, has already been shown in the general remark on dynamics; but that it is impossible can by no means be demonstrated from its conception alone, according to the principle of contradiction. Yet, even if no merely logical ground for its rejection be present, a universal physical ground for banishing it from natural science exists, namely, that of the possibility of the composition of a matter generally, if the latter [question] were only better understood. For if attraction, which is assumed for the explanation of the cohesion of matter, be only apparent, not real, attraction—but as it were the effect of a compression, by external matter (the ether) existing throughout the universe, which is itself brought to this pressure, by a universal and original attraction, namely, gravitation, an opinion supported by many reasons—empty space within matters would then, although not logically, be nevertheless dynamically, and hence physically, impossible, since every matter would expand of itself, in the empty spaces assumed within the same (as nothing would then resist its expansive force), and they