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TULASI-PRAJNĀ, March, 1990
language, that of "attribute”, to "substance", and since an attribute can have no existence except as the attribute of some substance, it follows that there can be no such thing as extension without matter, or in other words, there cannot be vacuum.”Is
Thuş, for Descartes, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, and without its substantive it cannot exist. Empty space, to him is as absurd as happiness without a sentiment being who is happy.19 Thus was deduced what for physicist is the most significant feature of the cartesian system, namely, the assertion that space is a plenum.20 Descartes has thus not accepted space as an independent reality
Another French philosopher and contemporary of Descartes, Pierje Gassendi (1592-1655), a priest who held a chair in the College de France, opposed the Cartesian doctrine of space. He thought that space is an existing being, unique in its kind, halfway between body and spirit, and neither substance nor accident.21 In opposition to the cartesian doctrine of space as a plenum, he defended the conception of atoms moving in the void; which Epicurus (C. 300 B.C.) had adopted from its originators Democritus and Leucippus, differing in size and shape, but not differing in constitution. The importance of Gassendi's views on space is that his opinions on this subject were adopted by Newton (1642-1727), and consequently came to be assumed as fundamental in all the physical investigations of the succeeding two-and-a-half centuries.22
Philosophy of Leibniz (1643-1716), a German philosopher and mathematician and contemporary of Newton, has an important place in the history of Western philosophy. Leibniz's concepts of space and time are important because of their originality and still more important because the views of Einstein, the renowned scientist of the present century, have a great resemblance with those three hundred years old concepts. Leibniz has vigorously criticized the Newtonian doctrine of space and time.23
Leibniz, in the last year of his life (1716) expressed his own conviction thus : "I hold space, and also time, to be something purely relative. Space is an order of co-existence as time is an order of successions. Space denotes in terms of possibility an order of things which in so far as they exist together exist at the same time, whatever be their seyeral ways of existing. Whenever we see various things together, we are conscious of this order between things themselves."24
Thus, according to Leibniz, space and time are neither things nor
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