Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton

EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA (Raleigh)

Isaac Newton's absolute space is very like John Dumbleton's imaginary

space, except that Newton's absolute space is supposed to exist in reality,
whereas Dumbleton's imaginary space exists only in human minds. As a
fourteenth-century scholastic Aristotelian of nominalistic tendencies, John
Dumbleton believed that only substances, or in rare instances such as the
Eucharist qualitative forms, exist independently. There is nothing in the natu-
ral world to which the label 'space' can be applied. In his early and unpub-
lished "De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum", Isaac Newton directly
contradicted scholastic Aristotelian views, saying that space exists but is nei-
ther substance nor accident, but rather an "affection of being qua being" or
the "emanent effect of the being existing in first place". In "De gravitatione",
Newton's goal was to combat Descartes' physics, which made all place and
motion relative to a body's immediate surroundings, and which equated
matter and extension. In so doing Newton followed anti-Cartesian pathways
marked out by Henry More, who had claimed that there can be spaces empty
of matter, but filled by extended spirit. In the first edition of the "Principia",
Newton largely avoided questions concerning the nature of space, turning
instead to mathematics, but he raised them again indirecdy in the General
Scholium added to the second edition of the "Principia", where he wrote
that God "constitutes" space. In both "De gravitatione" and the "Principia",
Newton pushed questions of metaphysics aside, giving mathematics central
stage and relegating more philosophical discussions to digressions or scholia.
When, in the twentieth century, Newtonian physics gave way to Einstein's
theories of special and general relativity, some of the issues raised by John
Dumbleton and other scholastics concerning imaginary space and the meas-
urement of motion were raised again, as well as problems of the existence
of absolute space and time.
In this paper I want to describe the role of imaginary space within John
Dumbleton's natural philosophy and then to examine Newton's concept of
absolute space, showing how issues raised about space by the Aristotelians
and Cartesians were not totally resolved, but instead remained in the back-
ground, ready to come back to haunt Newtonian physics in the twentieth
century.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 207

I. I m a g i n a r y s p a c e in the w o r k of J o h n D u m b l e t o n

In the classifications of the sciences accepted in later medieval universities,

natural philosophy was taken to describe the natural world in its fundamental
aspects. As the most basic part of natural philosophy, physics was an autono-
mous discipline originating in experience and finding principles that ex-
plained that experience. Physics was not inherendy mathematical, but the
disciplines of the quadrivium (as well as of the trivium) could be used as
tools within physics. A fourteenth-century scholastic such as John Dumb-
leton might attempt to develop a mathematical science of motion (sàentia de
motti), but as an Aristotelian, Dumbleton thought that the way to do so was
to abstract quantities from material bodies and their motions and then to deal
with their relationships1. On this understanding, the quantities that appear in
a mathematical science of motion actually exist in the outside world as acci-
dents of material substances. For purposes of the science they are mentally
abstracted from irrelevant complicating factors to be treated mathematically.
In trying to develop a quantified or mathematized physics, then, John
Dumbleton took his task as a natural philosopher to be different from the
task of a geometer. A geometer might assume that mathematical lengths are
unproblematic and that bodies are measured by mathematical lengths. A nat-
ural philosopher, according to Dumbleton, assumes that bodies are prior to
extensions:
quantity is not distinguished from the quantified thing, but any quantified thing is
quantity ... Aristode says in Book V of the Metaphysics that a line is long per se and
he implies that a body is long by a line that is separated in reality from body, as a
quality is separated from the subject, because a line is quantified per se, and this is
in the text of comment 19. And thus he expounds it as if longitude and latitude
were quantities per se and other things, such as bodies, were quantified by these
dimensions.
For these and other arguments that may be alleged to the contrary, it should be
said that Aristode talks in Book V of the Metaphysics explicating words as they are
used in various sciences. Thus he speaks as a geometer, or he explicates the word
as used by a geometer, and he does not talk as a natural philosopher. [But] a thing
as it is understood in geometry is not to be admitted into other sciences unless for
the sake of argument or information. Similarly, Grosseteste speaks understanding a
line and a quantity as a geometer, as if quantities were distinct from things quanti-
fied, which, simply speaking, should be denied 2 .

1 See E. Sylla, The Oxford Calculators and Mathematical Physics: John Dumbleton's Summa
Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis, Parts II and III, in: Physics, Cosmology and Astronomy,
1300-1700: Tension and Accommodation, ed. S. Unguru (Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science 126), Dordrecht-Boston-London 1991, 129-161.
2 John Dumbleton, "Summa", MS Cambridge, Peterhouse 272, f. 14va: "Ad istud est dicendum
iuxta probationer*/ argumentorum quod quantitas non distinguitur a re quanta, sed quelibet res quanta est
quantitas. ... Ad auctoritates que possunt adduci in contrarium. ... Item Aristoteles in 5 Melaphystce
dicit quod linea est per se longa et innuit corpus esse longum per lineam separatam in re a corpore, ut
qualitas separatur a subiecto quia linea est quanta per se et est in textu commenti 19i. Et ita exponit ac

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208 Edith Dudley Sylla

Thus medieval natural philosophers like Dumbleton did not assume that
they could use mathematical concepts like distance or extension without con-
sidering their appropriateness to natural philosophy. 'Place' {topos, locus) and
'space' were concepts that might be found in both mathematics and natural
philosophy, but that required different interpretations in the separate disci-
plines. Aristotle had discussed place in his attempt to lay the foundations of
physics. Aristotle knew that the atomists had supposed that the universe
consists of atoms and void or empty space. Aristotle argued, however, that
vacua are impossible, and that 'space' is an incoherent concept 3 . According
to Aristotle, the entire cosmos is a finite spherical plenum, outside of which
there is nothing, not even empty space.
As fourteenth-century nominalistic Aristotelians elaborated Aristotle's nat-
ural philosophy, they reinforced his denial of the physical reality or existence
of space and further developed Aristotle's concept of place. According to
Aristotle, place is defined to be the innermost unmoving surface of the sur-
rounding body or medium 4 . But according to the fourteenth-century nomi-
nalists such as William of Ockham and John Buridan, there are no such
indivisible things as surfaces in nature. With the possible exception of the
human soul, everything that exists in nature is a three-dimensional body.
Place, then, on the fourteenth-century nominalist understanding, could not
be the innermost surface of the surrounding medium — there being no such
surfaces — but was defined rather by reference to any innermost thin layer
of the surrounding medium insofar as it touched the body in place. If the
medium surrounding the body in place was assumed to be moving — as the
air around the tower of Notre Dame or the water in a river around a boat
—, then an additional specification of place as the distance to the sphere of
the moon or to the center of the cosmos might be used, but this distance

si longitudo et latitudo essent quantities per se et alie res ut corpora esserti quanta per illas dimensiones.
Pro istis et aliis allegandis in contrarium est dicendum quod Aristoteles loquitur in 5 Metaphysice exponendo
nomina prout in diversis scientàs utitur illis et ideo loquitur ut geometer vel exponit nomen apud geometrum
et non loquitur ut naturalis. Et res considerate apud geometrum non admittuntur nisi gratia argument! et
informaríonis ad alia scienda. Et similiter Lincoln loquitur intelligendo lineam et quantitatem ut geometer
ac si quantitates essent distincte a quanta, quod est negandum simpliàter:" There is no modem edition
of the "Summa." In preparing my dissertation, I transcribed Parts II—VI of the "Summa"
from Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 272 and looked also at other MSS for crucial passages. In
this paper I work from my transcription, checking against microfilm prints. For a detailed
outline of the conclusions of the work, see my The Oxford Calculators and the Mathematics
of Motion, 1 3 2 0 - 1 3 5 0 . Physics and Measurement by Latitudes (Harvard University Disser-
tations in History of Science), New York and London 1991.
3 A common conception of space would seem to make it a three-dimensional extension
considered apart from substance. See Aristotle, Physics, Bk. 4, Ch. 4, 211b7: "some sort of
extension between the bounding surfaces of the containing body." Aristotle and Averroes
take this definition to be the same as the definition sometimes given for a vacuum, and they
say that extension, in fact, never occurs without a body, because whenever one body leaves
a place, such as a vase, another follows immediately behind. See Averroes's comment 36.
4 Physics, 2 1 2 a 2 0 - 2 1 .

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 209

was also understood to be measured on a three-dimensional body or bodies,

because in the understanding of nominalistic scholastic Aristotelianism, ex-
tension or dimension is always the extension or dimension of some body.
Without body (or, in the special case of the Eucharist, without qualitative
form) there is no extension 5 .
In his "Summa logicae et philosophiae naturalis", John Dumbleton as-
sumed the usual cosmos of nominalistic Aristotelianism. For Dumbleton, as
for Aristotle, outside the cosmos there is nothing and inside the cosmos
extension is always the extension of some material body. But the cosmos was
pictured or imagined as a sphere, and so it was possible or even inevitable
that one imagined space outside of this sphere. Does it follow that space
exists outside the cosmos? In a passage at the end of Part VI of Dumbleton's
"Summa logicae et philosophiae naturalis", this question is raised and an-
swered:
... some, imagining, concede that outside of the heavens there is an infinite vacu-
um.
It is argued that this is not the case. Now outside the heaven there is something
real in some category or nothing. If something, therefore a substance or an acci-
dent. The consequent is false ... If nothing is outside the heaven that has any
existence except only an imaginary one, therefore it is not more to be said that
there is an infinite outside the heaven than a finite, a divisible outside the heavens
or an indivisible ...
To this it should be said that outside the heavens there is nothing, because
although we cannot imagine nothing outside the heaven except by imagining a
material reality negatively or affirmatively, nonetheless from this it does not follow
that there is an infinite outside the heaven. In the same way, although we under-
stand God by means of something material that is understood, nonetheless G o d
is not material, for this position follows imagination and not intellect, which is an
abstractive power 6 .

Thus, according to Dumbleton as according to Aristotle, there is nothing

outside the cosmos, not even empty space. We may imagine space there, but
we know that our imagination does not correspond to reality. It is as if we

5 See E. Sylla, The Transmission of the New Physics of the Fourteenth Century from England
to the Continent, in: La Nouvelle Physique du XXVe Siècle, ed. S. Caroti, Florence 1997,
65-110.
6 John Dumbleton, "Summa logicae et philosophiae naturalis", MS Cambridge Pe-
terhouse 272, f. 57va: "£/ quidamymaginando concedunt extra celum infinitum esse de vacuo. Arguitur
quod non. Nam extra celum est aliquid reak in alico predicamento vet nihil. Si aliquid, ergo substantìa
vel accidens. Consequens jalsum. ... Si nihil est extra celum quod est alicuius existende nisiymaginarie
solum, ergo non est magis dicendum infinitum extra celum quam finitum vel divisibile extra celum nec
indivisibile, quia cum nihil sit vacuum, per positionem, ergo infinitum vacuum est in puncto extra celum,
consequens Jalsum. Ad istud est dicendum extra celum nihil est, quia licet non possumus ymaginari nihil
esse extra celum nisi ymaginando reale materialis negative vel affirmative, tamen ex hoc non sequitur
infinitum esse extra celum. Sicut licet Deus intelligitur apud nos mediante re materiali intelkcta, non tamen
Deus est materialis. Nam hecpositioymaginationem sequitur et non intellectum, que est virtus abstractiva."

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210 Edith Dudley Sylla

had abstracted dimensions from bodies inside the cosmos and then, contrary
to fact, supposed that these dimensions really exist outside the cosmos where
there is no body. But if there is no real space outside the cosmos, then there
can be no real motion there.
For motion to occur in any category, Dumbleton argued, there must be a
body and there must be a real homogeneous continuum having part outside
part, which is gradually traversed or taken on by the body7. Failing a real
continuum to be traversed, there is no real motion. If a body were moved
locally but only the point where it was at any instant existed (the points
already traversed ceasing to exist), then there would be no way to measure
how far the body had gone. The situation would be similar if a body were
moved outside of the heavens:
... although we might have imagined simple motion outside the heavens, neverthe-
less there would be no real motion there, since from our imagining (ex hoc) it does
not follow that there is real motion outside the heavens, because things do not
follow imaginations (res non sequuntur ymaginationes) ... If we were to understand,
imagining, that point A moves in a straight line and acquires nothing in fact of a
distance that is divisible into really distinct parts; then point A is in no way really
moved unless according to imagination ... 8 .

In sum, according to Dumbleton, if we imagine that a body moves outside

the cosmos, it does not follow that it really moves there, because things do
not follow imaginations.
Dumbleton likely found the idea that things don't follow imaginations in
Averroes' commentary on the end of Book 3 of Aristotle's Physics (208al4—
15), with regard to infinity:

7 John Dumbleton, "Summa Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis", MS Cambridge, Pe-

terhouse 272, f. 23ra: "Sedpro istius explanatiow est advertendum quod multa requiruntur ad hoc quod
in alico predicamento sit verus motus. ... Item requiritur quod transitus ab uno contrario in aliud sit per
spacium continuum omogeneum in ilio predicamento et quod idem sparíum habeat in actu partem extra
partem, ut in quantitate quantitas est spacium illiuspredicamenti et in qualitate latitude intergradus"
8 Dumbleton makes these statements in arguing that real motion of alteration cannot occur
if all that exists are indivisible degrees of quality. MS Cambridge, Peterhouse 272, f. 17va:
"in omni vero motu et continuo duo sunt necessario requisita que realiter sunt distinda, scilicet spacium
divisible realiter et mobile. Cum ergo secundum istam opinionem nullum est spaàum divisibile in qualitate,
nec esse potest, sequitur quod in qualitate non est nec esse potest verus motus et continuus. ... Minor patet
sir. aliqua qualitas, puta calor ignis, intenditur usque ad summum uniformiter. Iuxta banc positionem
nulla talis distantia adquiritur illi calori, nec subiecto in quo est ille calor per illam alterationem nisi
secundum ymaginationem, eo quod ista positio dicit illuni calorem manere simplicem a principio usque in
finem sine alico adquisito vel deperdito. Ergo nullus est in hac alteratione verus motus nisiymaginarie. Ut
licetymaginati fuerimus simplicem motum extra celum, tamen nullus est ibi verus motus, cum ex hoc non
sequitur quod sit extra celum verus motus, quia res non sequuntur ymaginationes. ... si intelligamus
ymaginando A punctum movere recte et nihil adquirere de facto de distantia que est divisibilis in partes
distinctas realiter, tunc Λ punäus nullo modo vere moveretur nisi secundum ymaginationem ...". See also
E. Sylla, The Oxford Calculators and the Mathematics of Motion, 1320-1350 (note 2), and
eadem, The Oxford Calculators and Mathematical Physics: John Dumbleton's Summa Logi-
cae et Philosophiae Naturalis, Parts II and III (note 1), especially 142-46.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 211

Imagination makes one believe that it is infinite in act and in potency ... For we
cannot imagine outside the cosmos anything but a body or a vacuum. And if that
vacuum or body is supposed to be finite, then we cannot imagine outside it any-
thing but a vacuum or a body, from which it is supposed to follow that outside
the world there is an infinite body or a vacuum or infinite bodies ... And since
imagination does this, he [Aristode] begins to declare that many things exist which
cannot be imagined, and many things are imagined which do not exist ... and it
is not right to believe that existence follows imagination ... Indeed, what is in the
imagination exists only in the mind ... Imagination follows being [ens\, but being
does not follow imagination 9 .

W h e n D u m b l e t o n and o t h e r medieval authors write o f imaginary space, the

implication is that w e hypothesize o r think o f space outside the cosmos, but,
m o r e than this, that w e have an extended image. W e imagine space by think-
ing o f a b o d y o r bodies extended in three dimensions, while w e abstract f r o m
the matter o r impenetrability o f this body. T h e imagination separates quantity
f r o m matter, while in reality the t w o are never separate. Thus, in the medieval
conception, it is possible to imagine space outside the cosmos, but it does
n o t f o l l o w that any such entity exists in the real world. If imaginary space
has any existence, it is o n l y within the mind, as a sort o f mental i m a g e 1 0 .
Thus, like a chimera, imaginary space is something w e conjure u p by m e n -
tally combining o r separating parts o f images o r concepts derived f r o m ex-
perience, w i t h n o implication that such a conjured-up entity exists in the
outside world. But imaginary space seems to be something m o r e than this,
because, as D u m b l e t o n says, w e c a n n o t imagine the c o s m o s to be a sphere
w i t h o u t imagining something outside it, either something material o r s o m e -

9 Comment 75, Juntas edition, Venice 1562, vol. 4: "Imaginario facit credere infinitum, in actu esse,
et in potentia, in vero, scilicet et in falso. ... Non enim possumus imaginan extra mundum, nisi corpus,
aut vacuum. Et illud vacuum aut corpus, si ponatur finitum, tunc non possumus imaginan extra ipsum,
nisi aut vacuum, aut corpus ex quo existimatur sequi quod extra mundum est corpus infinitum, aut
vacuum, aut corpora infinita. ...Et cum imaginatio facit hoc, incoepit declorare quod multa sunt, que non
possunt imaginan, et multa imaginantur, quae non sunt ...et non est rectum credere quod esse sequitur
imaginationem ... Immo illud, quod est in imaginatione, non est nisi in anima tantum. ... Imaginatio
enim sequitur ens, sed non ens imaginationem."
10 The idea that imaginary space depends essentially on the human doing the imagining was
repeated in the 1640s in Thomas Hobbes's unpublished "Thomas White's De Mundo Exam-
ined" and so was still "in the air" in Newton's time. See T. Hobbes, Thomas White's De
Mundo Examined, Harold Whitmore Jones, trans., London 1976, 40 — 41: "Again, just as
one can remember the life-appearance of a man who died some time ago, even if the whole
world were destroyed except for one man, nothing would prevent this man from having an
image of a world which he had once seen, that is, from visualising a space extending from
him in all directions as far as he wished. Therefore 'imaginary space' is nothing else but 'the
image or conceit of a body'. ... Hence it is clear that the existence of space depends not
on the existence of body but on that of the imaginative faculty. ... But suppose ... for
example, that the world is finite, and that no creature endowed with imagination exists. Shall
we, or shall we not, say that there is space outside the world? On the supposition of a finite
world, of course there is no real space outside it; but there is no imaginary space either,
because we have excluded the possibility of a being possessed of imagination."

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212 Edith Dudley Sylla

thing immaterial. Does anything follow, for Dumbleton, from the fact that
we cannot avoid imagining space outside the cosmos? No, because imagina-
tion as a mental faculty is weaker than intellect. We cannot picture how it
could be possible that there is no empty space outside a spherical cosmos,
but by reason we can prove to ourselves that it must be so: empty space is
an incoherent concept, something like the concept of a square circle. Because
it is self-contradictory, it cannot exist. Where intellect and imagination con-
flict, it is intellect that is to be believed and not imagination.
In the medieval scholastic Aristotelian world view, something more could
be explained about the idea of space outside the cosmos by analogy to what
could be said about time before the creation of the world 11 . Aristotle had
argued that time is (and is only) the measure of motion with respect to before
and after. In the paradigm case, for Aristotle, we measure time by the daily
rotation of the primum mobile. One complete rotation of the heavens is a day,
two complete rotations are two days, and so forth, where days are units of
time. If there were no motion by which to measure time and if there were
no mind to do the measuring, then there would be no time. Thus time, in
the medieval scholastic system, is something that involves both the human
mind and motion in the external world. Time is not absolute, existing
whether or not anyone measures it, but always relative, the product of human
perception or measurement of the motion of physical bodies. John Dumb-
leton expressed the common view when he wrote:
Second it is doubted whether there would be time without a soul ... It must be
conceded that time is in act by the soul and time exists potentially outside of the
soul ... neither prior nor posterior is in act except by the soul, because, absolutely
speaking space has parts outside of parts, but it does not have absolutely a part
before another part except by our computation ... And because space does not
have, absolutely, prior and posterior except by our computation or because a mo-
bile begins from one extreme, therefore such an act with respect to prior and
posterior is said with respect to something extrinsic. Thus you should understand
the process that motion has with respect to the soul as an intelligible with respect
to the soul, which is not understood in act unless a soul understands, nor is prior
and posterior in act, nor time, nor any numbered number in act unless a soul
numbers and understands ... Thus from the motion outside [the soul], with the
actual computation in the soul of priority and posteriority, the motion becomes
time in act, that is the motion is actually numbered 12 .

11 For the idea of time before the cosmos, see R. Dales, Medieval Discussion of the Eternity
of the World, Leiden 1990, 13, 17, 191 sqq., 2 5 6 - 5 7 .
12 Dumbleton, "Summa", MS Cambridge, Peterhouse 272, f. 32rb: "Secundo dubitatur numquid
tempus sit sine anima. ... Pro isto est distinguendum quia tempus potest accipi duplidter, pro materia vel
pro forma, vel pro composito ex hiis ymaginarie vel ratione. Item duplidter acdpitur ens in actu: ut
compositum ex materia et forma et hoc est proprie compositum, vel alio modo diritur in actu ut sensibile
didtur in actu quia sentitur in actu et hoc improprie forte diritur in actu. ... Accipiendo tunc tempus esse
in actu secundo modo, concedendum est quod tempus est adu per animam et quod tempus est extra animam
in potentia propter proprium subiedum, quasi diceret quod tempus extra animam est subjedum talem quod
non est in actu secundum quod res est numerata nisi per animam. Sicut nec albedo est sensibilis in actu

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 213

There is no time in act without motion and a human mind numbering that
motion. Even the Prime Mover or God, existing alone, would not bring
about the passage of time, according to Dumbleton, because the Prime
Mover is immobile:
it is argued that the Prime Mover is time, because it endures, all duration is time,
therefore, etc. This is solved by a distinction: some things are time and duration
and are in time, namely things that are moved. Other things are in time and in
duration, but they are not time, nor duration, namely things resting and immobile.
The first branch of the distinction is clear. The second is proved. Time and dura-
tion do not have being except from the prior and posterior in motion, as from
their immediate cause. But since neither resting things nor immobile things have
the prior and posterior of motion, therefore these are not said per se to endure,
but through other things that are moved ... if there is no motion, but there are
resting and unmoved things, there is no time, because there is no motion , . . 1 3 .

Given this view, consider a natural interpretation of the creation story in

Genesis, according to which first God existed alone and then God created
the heaven and the earth ex nihilo. What about the time before the creation
of the cosmos? Before creation there was no time, because before creation
there was no motion and no mind to measure that motion. So God was
"before" creation in some sense, but this "before" is not the usual temporal
sense of "before". God is eternal not in the sense of having existed infinitely
long, but in the sense of not being in time at all. Then before the creation
of the cosmos time is immeasurable, not in the sense of being infinitely long,
but in the sense of not falling under the category of quantity at all.
By analogy to this point of view, then, God could be said to be "outside"
the cosmos in the same way that God is "before" the cosmos. God was
when there was no cosmos, but God was not for any measurable length of

nisi per sensum, ita nec prius nee posterius sunt in actu nisi per animam, quia simpliciter loquendo spacium
habet partem extra partem, non tarnen simpliciter habet partem ante aliam partem nisi iuxta computationem
nostram. ...Et quia spacium non habet simpliciter prius et posterius nisi per computationem a nobis, vet
ex hoc quod ab uno extremo incipit mobile, ideo talis actus respectu prius et posterius diritur respectu
extrinsici. Ita intelige processum quod motus se habet respectu anime sicut intelligibile respectu anime, quod
non est intellectum in actu nisi anima inteligat, nec est prius et posterius in actu, nec tempus, nec aliquid
numerus numeratus in actu nisi anima numeret et inteligat. Tempus tamen est sine anima prout accipitur
pro materia temporis que materia temporis est motus per se, ut albedo extra est materia sensibilis in actu.
Et secundum rem est tempus mobile motum. ... Ita ex motu extra cum actuali computatione in anima
prioritatis et posterioritatis fit Ule motus in actu tempus, id est artualiter numeratus est ille motus ...".
13 Dumbleton, "Summa", Cambridge, Peterhouse 272, f. 32va: "Aliter arguitur quod primus motor
sit tempus, quia ipse durât, omnis duratio est tempus, ergo et cetera. ... Istud solvetur per distinctionem
que sunt tempus et duratio, et sunt in tempore ut sunt mota. Alia sunt in tempore et in duratione, sed non
sunt tempus neque duratio ut sunt quiescentia et immobilia. Primum membrum patet. Secunda pars proba-
tur. Tempus et duratio non habent esse nisi ex priori et posteriori in motu tamquam a causa immediata,
sed cum [nec] quiescentia nec immobilia habet prius et posterius motus, ergo ista non per se dicunt durativa,
sed per alia que moventur. ... Item deducto motu stantibus quiescentibus et immotibus, nullum tempus est,
quia nullus motus est ...".

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214 Edith Dudley Sylla

time before the cosmos. Likewise God is outside the cosmos where there
are no bodies, but God is not in any measurable extension where there are
no bodies. When there is no motion, there is no time, and where there are
no bodies, there is no extension. God, being outside the cosmos, does not
create extension, because God is immeasurable. God does not have part
outside part, so there is no way to distinguish one place where God is outside
the cosmos from another place where God is outside the cosmos. God inside
and outside the cosmos, like the human soul in the body, is in place defini-
tively, and not circumscriptively — God is totally at every point, not one part
in one place and another part in another place.
Thomas Bradwardine and Nicole Oresme, the two fourteenth-century au-
thors most frequently mentioned in histories of the background of Newton's
concept of absolute space, essentially agree with the view of God's presence
outside the cosmos just described, according to which God is totally present
at every point of space and not intrinsically extended. Thomas Bradwardine's
discussion in De Causa Dei of God's ubiquity both inside and outside the
cosmos repeats in many ways that, although ubiquitous, God is not extended
or measurable 14 . For example, Bradwardine says:
Therefore God is necessarily, eternally, and infinitely everywhere in an infinite
imaginary position {sitü), whence he can be said to be truly omnipresent as he is
omnipotent. For a similar reason he can be said to be in some way infinite, infi-
nitely large, or of an infinite magnitude, and even in some way, although metaphysi-
cally and improperly, extensively. For he is inextensibly and undimensionally infi-
nitely extended. He coexists all together wholly with an infinite magnitude and
imaginary extension and with any of its parts. For this reason, he may similarly be
said to be immense and not measured, nor measurable with any measure ,.. 1 5 .

Thus God is only "metaphysically and improperly" extended, in the sense

that we imagine extension outside the cosmos, at every point of which God
is wholly present — God "coexists all together wholly with an infinite magni-
tude and imaginary extension and with any of its parts". God is "not meas-
ured, nor measurable by any measure."
In his "Le Livre du ciel et du monde", Nicole Oresme also emphasized
God's non-extended presence in infinite extracosmic space, making an anal-
ogy between the way God is present in eternity and the way he is present in
infinite space:
It seems to me and I reply that, in the first place, the human mind consents
naturally, as it were, to the idea that beyond the heavens and outside the world,
which is not infinite, there exists some space whatever it may be, and we cannot

14 See E. Grant, Much Ado About Nothing. Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle
Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge 1981, 1 3 5 - 4 4 .
15 Thomas Bradwardine, De Causa Dei Contra Pelagium, et De Virtute Causarum, London
1618, reprint Frankfurt am Main 1964, 178 — 79. My translation. E. Grant has also translated
this passage in his Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge, Mass. 1974, 5 5 5 - 6 8 .

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 215

easily conceive the contrary ... Thus outside the heavens, then, is an empty incor-
poreal space quite different from any other plenum or corporeal space, just as the
extent of this time called eternity is of a different sort than temporal duration,
even if the latter were perpetual, as has been stated earlier in this chapter. Now
this space of which we are talking is infinite and indivisible, and is the immensity
of God and God Himself, just as the duration of God called eternity is infinite,
indivisible, and God Himself, as already stated above. Also, we have already de-
clared in this chapter that, since our thinking cannot exist without the concept of
transmutation, we cannot properly comprehend what eternity implies; but, never-
theless, natural reason teaches us that it does exist ... Likewise, since apperception
of our understanding (cognoissance de nostre entendement) depends upon our corporeal
senses, we cannot comprehend nor conceive this incorporeal space which exists
beyond the heavens. Reason and truth (rayson et vérité), however, inform us that it
exists 16 .

So extracosmic incorporeal space is to intracosmic extension as God's eter-

nity is to time. As God is not extended in time, so God is not extended in
extracosmic space — the space outside the cosmos is infinite and indivisible.
Although we cannot conceive how this is possible, nevertheless reason and
truth tell us that it is so.
In sum, the science of physics proved intellectually to fourteenth-century nat-
ural philosophers that, contrary to imagination, there is no measurable exten-
sion outside of the cosmos, because there cannot be extension where there
is no substance with parts outside of or distinguishable from parts. The
adjective 'imaginary' served as an explanation of how we come to conceive
of such space, but also as a reminder that there is no real extension or
dimension where there is nothing that has parts distinguishable from each
other. In both fourteenth-century scholasticism and twentieth-century theo-
ries of relativity, our everyday ideas or imaginations about space and time are
shown to be scientifically or intellectually faulty.

II. F r o m i m a g i n a r y to a b s o l u t e s p a c e

In Isaac Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", what

had been supposed to be imaginary instead came to represent reality. The
fourteenth-century objection that there is no real extension where there is
no homogeneous continuous entity with distinguishable parts was set aside,
and there was a change, not only in what philosophers thought was true, but

16 Nicole Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde, ed. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy, Madison
1968, 177. See also A. Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert, Rome 1949, 23,
315-20. Oresme also discusses this extracosmic space in his questions on the Physics,
where he says, Maier, op. cit., 316: "sicut se habet locus ad immensitatem quae est extra caelum, ita
tempus (ad aeternitatem) ... Unde sicut ipsa immensitas est Deus, in quo sunt omnia, ita ipsa aeternitas
est ipse Deus, cui nihil est coaeternum."

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216 Edith Dudley Sylia

also in what they thought was possible. This was accomplished by switching
attention from natural philosophy with empirical foundations, to mathemat-
ics -with foundations in axioms and definitions.
In the fourteenth century, the idiosyncratic Jean de Ripa had proposed
that God is immobile because God causes or is constitutive of imaginary
space:
For an entity coexisting by its presence with some position (situi) to be immobile,
it is ... necessary that such presence is somehow causal and constitutive (causalis
et constitutive of the imaginary place. Whence it should be known that, if there is
some essence, which is creative (variant: causative) of a vacuum, such that the
imaginable vacuum would not exist except by such a power, then such a power is
entirely immobile locally, because an imaginary or positive place would not be
prerequisite for its being; nor would it properly be in a positive or imaginary place,
since from it would derive all such position, but it would be rather in itself naturally
before all such position (situi). So it is with the divine being. Whence I say that
... from the divine being, by reason of its immensity and immense ability to cause
the existence of creatures, flows in some way intelligibly a priori, as from a cause,
all imaginary extensive local distance \fluit quodammodo intelligibiliter a priori tamquam
a causa omnis ymaginaria distantia extensive localis], such that the negation of such
immensity implies a priori the negation of all imaginary position. And I say ... the
divine presence is causal, that is in some way making or bringing it about that the
imaginary position to which it is present is so-and-so-great an imaginary position,
that is, that it is possible to have so-and-so-great a positive quantitative distance
(esse tantum vel tantumymaginarium situm, id est possibilem habere tantam vel tantam distan-
tiam positivam quantitativam)X1.

God causes or creates or constitutes the imaginary place — without God's

causation such a vacuum or imaginary space would not exist 18 . For Ripa,
imaginary place flows from God before the creation of the cosmos, but it is
not a perfection that competes with God's perfection, because an emanation
is not a separate perfection from its source, and it ceases to exist when its
source ceases to exist.
In the seventeenth century, Henry More proposed a similar relation of
God to space. In an appendix to "An Antidote Against Atheism", More
argued that only God and not matter is necessarily existent:
Others there are that seem to come nearer to the mark, while they alledge against
the fourth posture of our Argument that necessary Existence is plainly involved
in the Idea of Matter. For, say they, a man cannot possibly but imagine a Space
running out in infinitum every way, whether there be a God or no. And this Space
being extended thus, and measurable by Yards, Poles, or the like, it must needs be

17 A. Combes, F. Ruello, and P. Vignaux, Jean De Ripa I Sent. Dist. XXXVII: De Modo
Inexistendi Divine Essentie in Omnibus Creaturis, in: Traditio 23 (1967), 2 2 7 - 2 8 . Ripa both
implies that space flows from God and uses the verb constituerez which Newton was to use
in the second edition of the "Principia" (see below).
18 Cf. Grant, Much Ado About Nothing, 341 - 2 n 5 9 , 344n82.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 217

something, in that it is thus extended and measurable, for Non-entity can have no
affection or property. And if it be an Entity, what can it be but corporeal Matter?
But I answer, If there were no Matter, but the Immensity of the Divine Essence
only, occupying all by his Ubiquity, that the Replication, as I may so speak, of his
indivisible substance, whereby he presents himself intirely everywhere, would be
the Subject of that Diffusion and Mensurability. And I adde further, That the
perpetual observation of this infinite Amplitude and Mensurability, which we can-
not disimagine in our Phansie but will necessarily be, may be a more rude and
obscure Notion offered to our Mind of that necessary and self-existent Essence
which the Idea of God does with greater fulness and distictness represent to us.
For it is plain that not so much as our Imagination is engaged to an appropriation
of this Idea of Space to corporeal Matter, in that it does not naturally conceive
any impenetrability or tangibility in the Notion thereof; and therefore it may as
well belong to a Spirit as a Body ...

God similarly provides a basis for time:

Now there is the same reason for Time (by Time I mean Duration) as for Space.
For we cannot imagine but that there has been such a continued Duration as could
have no beginning nor interruption. And any one will say, it is non-sense that there
should be such a necessary duration, when there is no reali Essence that must of
it self thus be always, and for ever so endure. What or who is it then that this
eternal, uninterrupted and never-fading duration must belong to? No Philosopher
can answer more appositely then the holy Psalmist, From everlasting to everlasting
thou art God. Wherefore I say that those unavoidable imaginations of the necessity
of an Infinite Space, as they call it, and Eternal duration, are no proofs of a Self-
existent Matter, but rather obscure subindications of the necessary Existence of
God 19 .

René Descartes, to whom More was responding, had said that the matter
or body of the cosmos must extend beyond any limit, because wherever we
imagine extension there must be body. Henry More turned this around to
argue that not body but spirit or God must be present. Agreeing with the
scholastics that where there is extension in space or duration in time there
must be some existing thing, More argues that this need not be a body, but
may be spirit or God.
When More had written to Descartes in 1648 arguing that God and angels
are extended, Descartes had replied by reaffirming the standard Aristotelian
objection that spiritual entities have no parts and hence no real extension,
and so cannot be supposed to account for extensions empty of body:
I am not in the habit of disputing about words, and therefore if somebody wants
to say that God is, in some sense, extended because He is everywhere, I shall not
object. But I deny a true extension, such as is usually conceived by everybody, to

19 H. More, Appendix to An Antidote Against Atheism, in: A Collection of Several Philosophi-

cal Writings, 2nd. ed., vol. 1, London 1662, reprint New York and London 1978, 163 - 64.
Italics in original removed.

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218 Edith Dudley Sylla

be found in God, in an Angel, in our soul, or in any substance that is not a body.
For by an extended thing everybody understands something imaginable (be it an
ens rationis or a real thing, which I leave here undecided) in which various parts of
a determined magnitude and figure, of which the one is in no way the other, can
be distinguished in imagination; so that it is possible, by imagination, to transfer
any one of them to the place of another, but not to imagine two of them in the
same place. But of God, or even of our mind, nothing of the sort can be said; it
is not imaginable, but intelligible only, nor is it distinguishable in parts, especially
not in parts which have determinate magnitudes and figures. Moreover, we can
easily understand that human mind, and God, and at the same time several angels
can be in one and the same place. From which it manifestly follows that no incor-
poreal substances are extended in a proper sense ... Thus only what is imaginable,
as having parts outside parts that are of a determinate magnitude and figure, do I
call extended ... 2 0 .

Thus Descartes agreed with Dumbleton, Bradwardine, Oresme and the other
scholastics that since God and other spiritual entities do not have distinguish-
able parts, they cannot provide the basis for extension empty of body. Des-
cartes continued:
I am surprised that a man otherwise so perspicacious, when he sees that he cannot
deny that in every space there is a substance, since all the properties of extension
are truly in it, would prefer to say that divine extension fills the space in which
there is no body, than to acknowledge that no space whatsoever can be without
body. Moreover, as I have already said, this pretended extension of God in no way
can be the subject of true properties which we most distinctly perceive in every
space. God is neither imaginable nor distinguishable in parts that are measurable
and figured21.

Thus Descartes rejected More's attempt to use God or other spirits to pro-
vide a subject for or foundation of space where there was no body.

III. Isaac N e w t o n and a b s o l u t e space

When Isaac Newton first began to think about space and time, he was
reacting to Descartes' physics. Because Descartes wanted to develop a physics
immune to the objections of the Catholic church against the moving earth
of Copernicanism, he had adopted Aristotle's definition of a body's place as
depending upon the immediately surrounding bodies. Then Descartes could
argue that, scientifically or philosophically speaking, the earth is at rest rela-
tive to the aether surrounding it, even if that aether as a whole is rotating

20 "Responsum R. Cartesii ad Epistolam H. Mori", in H. More, A Collection of Several Philo-

sophical Writings, vol. 1, 67. My translation based on the translation by A. Koyré in: From
the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore and London 1957/1968, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 .
21 Ibid., 68.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 219

around the sun. Newton saw problems and inconsistencies in Descartes'

proposal, because it would imply that there is no connection between a body's
velocity and the forces exerted on it or the resulting effects. If one exerted
a force on the immediately surrounding bodies, Newton said, then, by Des-
cartes' criteria, the velocity of the body in question would change.
For these and similar reasons, Newton argued, motions should be meas-
ured relative to unmoving or absolute space, and not, as Descartes argued,
relative to the immediately surrounding medium. But what was this unmov-
ing or absolute space separate from whatever bodies might happen to fill it?
In his unpublished "De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum", probably
written in the period 1664 — 68, Newton began by assuming that the words
'quantity', 'duration', and 'space' were too well known to be defined through
other terms, and he went on to define 'place' in terms of space, and then
'body', 'rest', and 'motion' in terms of place, saying, for instance that "body
is that which fills place", and "motion is change of place". After a few words
of explanation of these definitions, Newton began a long digression refuting
the definitions of place, motion, and extension in Descartes' "Principia". He
proposed to overthrow Cartesian physics, first of all, by rejecting the Aristo-
telian categories:

Perhaps now it may be expected that I should define extension as substance or

accident or else nothing at all. But by no means, for it has its own mode of
existence (quendam sibi proprium existendi moduni) which fits neither substances nor
accidents. It is not substance; on the one hand, because it is not absolute in itself,
but subsists as it were as an emanent effect of God (tanquam Dei effectus emanativus)
and a certain affection of every being (omnis entis affectio quaedam)·, on the other
hand, because it is not subject to the sort of proper affections (ejusmodi proprijs
affectionibus) that denote substance, namely actions, such as thoughts in the mind
and motions in body ... Moreover, since we can clearly conceive concipere extension
existing as it were without any subject, as when we may imagine spaces outside
the world or places empty of any bodies, and we believe icredtmus) [extension] to
exist wherever we imagine there are no bodies, and we cannot believe that it would
perish with the body if God should annihilate anything, it follows that [extension]
does not exist in the mode of an accident inherent in some subject (non per modum
acàdentis inhaerendo alicui subjecto existere). And hence it is not an accident. And much
less may it be said to be nothing, since it is more something than an accident, and
approaches more nearly to the nature of substance. There is no Idea of nothing,
nor has nothing any properties, but we have an exceptionally clear Idea of exten-
sion, by abstracting, that is, the affections and properties of body so that the
uniform and unlimited stretching out of space in length, breadth and depth re-
mains alone ,.. 2 2 .

22 A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, Cambridge 1962/
1978, 131 — 32. After comparison with the discussion and translations in J. E. McGuire,
Existence, Actuality and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time, in: Annals of Science 35
(1978), 4 6 3 - 5 0 8 , 1 have adapted the Hall's translation for greater fidelity to Newton's termi-
nology. Cf. Grant, Much A d o About Nothing, 199 — 221. In rejecting the choice between
substance and accident for space, Newton was preceded by Francesco Patrizi and Pierre
Gassendi, as well as Walter Charleton. Patrizi says simply that God created space before he

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220 Edith Dudley Syllí

Thus N e w t o n asserted that space exists, although it does n o t fit into the
scholastic categories o f substance or accident — the only categories that can
correspond to separately existing things according to nominalistic scholasti-
cism. Moreover, because w e have a clear conception o f extension w h e r e there
is n o body, there must be such extension — in this way N e w t o n , like Des-
cartes and unlike D u m b l e t o n , let the necessities o f human thought and imagi-
nation determine w h a t must be true in reality.
N e w t o n then w e n t o n to enumerate the properties o f extension, showing
not only "that it is something, but w h a t it is." A s his f o u r t h point, he says:

4. Space is an affection of being qua being {spatium est entis quatenus ens offertici). No
being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is every-
where, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies;
and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it
follows that space is an emanative effect if the being existing in first place {spatium
sit entis primario existentis effectus emanativus), because when any being is posited, space
is posited. And the same may be asserted of duration: for certainly both are affec-
tions or attributes of being according to which we denominate the quantity of
existence of any individual thing with regard to amplitude of presence and persis-
tence of existence. So the quantity of the existence of God in relation to duration
was eternal, and in relation to the space to which he is present infinite; and the
quantity of the existence of a created thing in relation to duration was as great as
the duration from the beginning of its existence, and, in relation to the amplitude
of its presence, as great as the space to which it is present ... 2 3 .

created anything else and that (Grant, 204), "granted that the categories serve well for
worldly things {in mandants)·, Space is not among worldly things {de mundanis), it is other than
the world {mundus). It is the accident of no worldly thing {mundanae), whether body or not
body, whether substance or accident - it is prior to them all." In an attempt to describe
the nature of space, Patrizi said (Grant, 206): "Therefore it is an incorporeal body and a
corporeal non-body." Gassendi, influenced by Patrizi, says even more clearly that space and
time are neither substance nor accident, nor are they dependent on the mind (Grant, 210),
"space and time must be considered real things, or actual entities, for although they are not
the same sort of things as substance and accident are commonly considered, they still
actually exist and do not depend upon the mind like a chimera since space endures stead-
fastly and time flows on whether the mind thinks of them or not." Despite these bold
beginnings, Gassendi seems to have held a view not unlike the scholastics when he says
(Grant, 211) that by 'space' "we do not mean anything but that space which is generally
called imaginary and which the majority of sacred doctors admit exists beyond the world."
This space is called imaginary "because we have an image of its dimensions by analogy to
the dimensions that appear to our senses." In saying here that space is only as it were
{tanquam) a emanative effect, Newton indicates some ambivalence. This would correspond
to the change he made in the queries to the Optick.r, where instead of saying that space was
God's sensorium, he tried to change all the copies to say that space is as it were (tanquam)
God's sensorium. See A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen, The Case of the Missing Tanquam, in:
Isis 52 (1961): 555-66. It might be noted, however, that in scholastic Latin, tanquam doesn't
necessarily have a counterfactual connotation, as when the Oxford Calculators and others
asked how to measure motion tanquam penes causam (in terms of the forces and resistances
causing the motion) and tanquam penes effectum (in terms of the space traversed).
23 Although this text is ambiguous about whether space also results from the existence of
bodies, in the Leibniz — Clarke correspondence, Clarke makes it clear that space results only

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 221

Then as his sixth point he concentrates on the relation of God to space

and time:
6. Lastly, space is eternal in duration and immutable in nature, and this because it
is the emanent effect of an eternal and immutable being. If ever space had not
existed, God at that time would have been nowhere; and hence he either created
space later (in which he was not himself), or else, which is not less repugnant to
reason, he created his own ubiquity. Next, although we can possibly imagine (imagi-
nari) that there is nothing in space, yet we cannot think (cogitare) that space does
not exist, just as we cannot think {cogitare) that there is no duration, even though
it would be possible to suppose (fingere) that nothing whatever endures. This is
manifest from the spaces beyond the world, which (since we imagine [imaginamui\
the world to be finite) we cannot think not to exist {non possumus cogitare non esse),
although they are neither revealed to us by God, nor known from the senses, nor
do they depend upon the spaces within the world with respect to existence. But it
is usually believed that these spaces are nothing; yet indeed they are truly spaces.
Although space may be empty of body, nevertheless it is not void of itself; and it
is something that spaces are there, although nothing besides. Moreover, it must be
acknowledged that spaces are no more spaces where the world is, than where no
world exists, unless perchance you say that when God created the world in this
space he at the same time created space in itself, or that if God should annihilate
the world in these spaces, he would also annihilate the spaces in themselves. What-
ever has more reality in one space than in other space must belong to body rather
than to space; the same thing will appear more clearly if we lay aside that childish
prejudice according to which extension is inherent in bodies like an accident in a
subject without which it cannot in fact exist 24 .

Thus, to the scholastic and Cartesian argument that all extension is associ-
ated with material bodies, Newton responds simply by calling it a childish
prejudice {puerile illud et ab infantia derivatum praejudidum). But he goes on:

from the existence of the Immensum, or God. See A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen, Newton and
the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, in: Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences 15
(1962), 93 (Clarke's fifth reply): "Space is not an Affection of one Body, or of another Body,
or of any finite Being; nor passes from Subject to Subject; but is always invariably the
Immensity of one only and always the same Immensum". Part of the ambiguity of Newton's
statement comes from his saying that "spatium sit entis primario existentis e f f e c t i f s emanativui',
given the uncertain sense of "entis primario existentii\ Probably, however, we should assume
that by this Newton means God. So Henry More, in a very Neoplatonic context, uses the
similar term 'Primary Substance' (The Immortality of the Soul, in: A Collection of Several
Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 26, "I say that though we should acknowledge the Inmost
Centre of life, or the very First point, as I may so call it, of the Primary Substance [for this
Primary Substance is in some sort gradual] to be purely indivisible, it does not at all follow,
no not according to Imagination it self, that it must be nothing. ... This inmost Centre
therefore of life is something, and something so full of essential vigour and virtue, that
though gradually it diminish, yet can fill a certain Sphere of Space with its own presence
and activity, as a spark of light illuminates the duskish aire". Italics removed).
24 Isaac Newton, "De Gravitatione", in A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, Unpublished Scientific
Papers of Isaac Newton, 132-38. I have modified their translation. Latin text 104-105.

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222 Edith Dudley Sylla

lest anyone should for this reason imagine God after the fashion of a body to be
extended and made of divisible parts, it should be known that the very spaces
themselves are not divisible in act, and furthermore, that any being has a mode
proper to itself by which it is present to spaces. Thus, indeed, duration has a very
different relationship to space than body has. For we do not ascribe diverse dura-
tions to the diverse parts of space, but say that all endure together. The moment
of duration is the same at Rome and at London, on the Earth and on the stars,
and through all the heavens. And just as we understand any moment of duration
to be diffused (diffutidi) throughout all spaces, according to its manner, without
any concept of parts of it, so it is no more contradictory that Mind {Mens) also,
according to its manner, can, without any concept of parts, be diffused through
space25.

Here Newton proposes a new and ingenious analogy between the identity
of God in different places and the identity of time — just as it is the same
time at different places, even though time has no parts, so the same God is
wholly and without parts at every place. But he glosses over a different
problem — if God is the same everywhere, how can one empty space be
distinguished from another?
Thus, in "De gravitatione", Newton had several alternative explanations
of absolute space — it is a common affection of existing things, it is an
emanent effect of God, etc. —, but in the first edition of "Principia" he
largely bypassed them by turning to a mathematical style of presentation. In
"De gravitatione", Newton had already proposed to distinguish mathematics
from natural philosophy, but to illustrate his mathematical results by the
results of experiment:
It is proper to treat the science of gravity and of the equilibrium of fluid and solid
bodies in fluids by two methods. To the extent that it appertains to the mathemati-
cal sciences, it is reasonable that I largely abstract it from physical considerations.
And for this reason I have undertaken to demonstrate its individual propositions
from abstract principles, sufficiently well known to the student, stricdy and geo-
metrically. Since this doctrine may be judged to be somewhat akin to natural phi-
losophy, in so far as it may be applied to making clear many of the phenomena of
natural philosophy, and in order, moreover, that its usefulness may be particularly
apparent and the certainty of its principles perhaps confirmed, I shall not be reluc-
tant to illustrate the propositions abundantly from experiments as well, in such a
way, however, that this freer method of discussion, disposed in scholia, may not
be confused with the former which is treated in Lemmas, propositions, and corol-
laries26.

Newton retained this format — with its distinction between strict mathemat-
ics and more relaxed empirical scholia — when he came to write the "Prin-

25 A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 . Latin,

1 0 3 - 1 0 4 . Again, after comparison with McGuire's translations, I have made some changes
in the translation to capture the exact sense.
26 "De gravitatione", 121.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 223

cipia" nearly twenty years later. As in "De gravitatione", so in the "Principia",

what Newton had to say about the metaphysical nature of space fell under
the rubric of scholium or commentary, rather than being included in the
mathematical core. The space of the "Principia" was first of all a mathemati-
cal entity posited to exist, not something derived from experience or meas-
urement. But in a scholium to the definitions of Book I, Newton introduced
absolute time and space, explaining what he supposed them to be. Echoing
"De gravitatione," Newton began by saying:
Hitherto I have laid down the definitions o f such words as are less known, and
explained the sense in which I would have them to be understood in the following
discourse. I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to
all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under
no other notions but f r o m the relation they bear to sensible objects. A n d thence
arise certain prejudices, for the removing o f which it will be convenient to distin-
guish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and com-
mon27.

So, with regard to time, space, place, and motion, according to Newton, it
is necessary to distinguish absolute from relative, true from apparent, and
mathematical from common. Then, in a crucial move, Newton assumes that
in these three pairs of contrasting terms, the three first terms refer to a single
sort of entity, while the three second terms refer to different sorts of entities:
1. Absolute, true, and mathematical time, o f itself, and f r o m its own nature, flows
equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called dura-
tion; relative, apparent, and common time is some sensible and external (whether
accurate or unequable) measure o f duration by the means o f motion, which is
commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.
2. Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains
always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or meas-
ure o f the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies;
and which is commonly taken for immovable space 2 8 .

So absolute, true, and mathematical time is one thing, while relative, apparent,
and common time is something else. By parallel construction, absolute space
is true and mathematical space. Whereas scholastic Aristotelian natural phi-
losophy was understood to describe the outside world and scholastic mathe-
matical sciences were assumed to abstract quantity from the world, the "Prin-
cipia" presents an autonomous mathematical science which is, at the same
time, the absolute and true science.
How is it that, for Newton, it is absolute mathematical space that is true
or real, whereas for the scholastics it had been physical bodies that are real?

27 F. Cajori, trans., Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Berkeley
and Los Angeles 1962, 6.
28 Ibid.

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224 Edith Dudley Sylls

In the General Scholium added to the second edition of the "Principia",

Newton tried to explain how God "constitutes" absolute space. He reiterated
the analogy between the ubiquity of God and time, and he implied that as
the human soul unites the body, so God unites space:
He [God] is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration
and space, but he endures and is present. He endures always, and is present every-
where; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes (constìtuiì) duration
and space. Since every part of space is always, and every indivisible moment of
duration is everywhere, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things will not be
never, nowhere. Every sensing soul in diverse times and in diverse senses and
organs of morion, is the same indivisible person. There are successive parts in
duration, coexistent parts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person
(or the thinking principle) of a human being; and much less can they be found in
the thinking substance of God. Every human being, to the extent of being a
sensing being, is one and the same human being during his whole life, in all and
each organ of sense. God is one and the same God always and everywhere 29 .

Thus in the conception that the General Scholium suggests, God "consti-
tutes" space by the fact that God is one in all the separate parts and points
of space, just as the human soul or mind is one while existing throughout
the body, undergirding the existence of a single person 30 . In this way Newton
followed Jean de Ripa and Henry More in proposing that space results from
God's presence, while at the same time he was careful to deny that God is
extended. While Dumbleton, Bradwardine, and Oresme followed the logic
of similar conceptions to the conclusion that the empty extracosmic space
in which God is present is imaginary, Newton insisted that it is mathematical
and true.
Early on, Newton had explored the idea of composing a continuum from
indivisibles, and he may well have thought at that time that God's indivisible
omnipresence might "constitute" extension in the same way. Later, Newton
returned to the standard Euclidean/Archimedean view that indivisibles can
never compose a continuum, and so this was no longer an option for under-
standing the relation of God to space. The safer way out was to omit all
reference to such problems and to present instead a mathematical science.
In "The Janus Face of Genius", Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs shows how New-
ton experimented with many different explanations of the cause of gravity
in his early work, only to omit them from the first edition of the "Principia",

29 Ibid., 545. Translation changed for accuracy after comparison with Latin in: A. Koyré and
I. B. Cohen (eds.), Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, third edi-
tion (1726) with variant readings, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1972, vol. 2, 761, and with J. E.
McGuire, Existence, Actuality, and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time, 478.
30 Suggestively, in his early work, Newton had used the English "constitute" in considering
whether points constitute a body. A similar meaning is appropriate in the General Scholium,
since G o d is supposed to constitute extension by a replication of indivisibility. G o d "consti-
tutes" extension, while G o d himself is not extended.

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 Imaginary Space: John Dumbleton and Isaac Newton 225

and then to reintroduce them, tentatively, in later work 31 . A similar chronol-

ogy holds true of Newton's changing ideas of the metaphysics of space. As
in the case of gravity, so in the case of space, Henry More supplied some of
the physical explanations that Newton explored and set aside. It may well be
that in Newton's private thoughts about space More's identification of God
and space played a bridging role, so that an immaterial extension became for
Newton not something incoherent, but rather something that he could not
think not to exist. In the "Principia", however, instead of making reference
to ideas like More's, Newton adopted a Cartesian epistemological stance,
justifying himself by what he clearly conceived to be true. Thus the imaginary
space of scholasticism was transformed into the absolute space of Newton.

31 B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus face of genius: The role o f alchemy in Newton's thought, Cam-
bridge 1991.

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