Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/270

 194 existence of all corporeal beings, and all the measures of time, taken from the great bodies of the world and their motions. But yet every one easily admits, that though we make duration boundless, as certainly it is, we cannot yet extend it beyond all being. God, every one easily allows, fills eternity, and it is hard to find a reason why any one should doubt that he likewise fills immensity. His infinite being is certainly as boundless one way as another, and methinks it ascribes a little too much to matter to say where there is no body, there is nothing.

§ 4. Hence, I think, we may learn the reason why every one familiarly, and without the least hesitation, speaks of, and supposes eternity, and sticks not to ascribe infinity to duration; but it is with more doubting and reserve that many admit or suppose the infinity of space. The reason whereof seems to me to be this; that duration and extension being used as names of affections belonging to other beings, we easily conceive in God infinite duration, and we cannot avoid doing so; but not attributing to him extension, but only to matter, which is finite, we are apter to doubt of the existence of expansion without matter, of which alone we commonly suppose it an attribute. And therefore when men pursue their thoughts of space, they are apt to stop at the confines of body, as if space were there at an end too, and reached no farther. Or if their ideas upon consideration carry them farther, yet they term what is beyond the limits of the universe imaginary space; as if it were nothing, because there is no body existing in it: whereas duration, antecedent to all body, and to the motions which it is measured by, they never term imaginary, because it is never supposed void of some other real existence. And if the names of things may at all direct our thoughts towards the originals of men's ideas (as I am apt to think they may very much), one may have occasion