Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/263

Ch. 14. measured, no more than the different standards of a foot and a cubit alter the notion of extension to those who make use of those different measures.

§ 24. The mind having once got such a measure of time as the annual revolution of the sun, can apply that measure to duration, wherein that measure itself did not exist, and with which, in the reality of its being, it had nothing to do; for should one say, that Abraham was born in the two thousand seven hundred and twelfth year of the Julian period, it is altogether as intelligible as reckoning from the beginning of the world, though there were so far back no motion of the sun, nor any motion at all. For though the Julian period be supposed to begin several hundred years before there were really either days, nights, or years, marked out by any revolutions of the sun; yet we reckon as right, and thereby measure durations as well, as if really at that time the sun had existed, and kept the same ordinary motion it doth now. The idea of duration equal to an annual revolution of the sun, is as easily applicable in our thoughts to duration, where no sun nor motion was, as the idea of a foot or yard, taken from bodies here, can be applied in our thoughts to distances beyond the confines of the world, where are no bodies at all.

§ 25. For supposing it were five thousand six hundred and thirty-nine miles, or millions of miles, from this place to the remotest body of the universe (for, being finite, it must be at a certain distance) as we suppose it to be five thousand six hundred and thirty-nine years from this time to the first existence of any body in the beginning of the world; we can, in our thoughts, apply this measure of a year to duration before the creation, or beyond the duration of bodies or motion, as we can this measure of a mile to space beyond the utmost bodies; and by the one measure duration where there was no motion, as well as by the