Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/246

170 take from God a power to annihilate any particle of it.

§ 23. But not to go so far as beyond the utmost bounds of body in the universe, nor appeal to God's omnipotency to find a vacuum, the motion of bodies that are in our view and neighbourhood seems to me plainly to evince it. For I desire any one so to divide a solid body, of any dimension he pleases, as to make it possible for the solid parts to move up and down freely every way within the bounds of that superficies, if there be not left in it a void space as big as the least part into which he has divided the said solid body. And if where the least particle of the body divided is as big as a mustard-seed, a void space equal to the bulk of a mustard-seed be requisite to make room for the free motion of the parts of the divided body within the bounds of its superficies, where the particles of matter are 100,000,000 less than a mustard-seed, there must also be a space void of solid matter as big as 100,000,000 part of a mustard-seed; for if it hold in one it will hold in the other, and so on in infinitum. And let this void space be as little as it will, it destroys the hypothesis of plenitude: for if there can be a space void of body equal to the smallest separate particle of matter now existing in nature, it is still space without body, and makes as great a difference between space and body, as if it were, a distance as wide as any in nature. And therefore if we suppose not the void space necessary to motion equal to the least parcel of the divided solid matter, but to $1⁄10$ or $1⁄1000$ of it, the same consequence will always follow of space without matter.

§ 24. But the question being here "whether the idea of space or extension be the same with the idea of body," it is not necessary to prove the real existence of a vacuum, but the idea of it; which it is plain men have, when they inquire and dispute whether there