2. Immensity

By this we mean that God’s nature (a) is without extension; (b) is subject to no limitations of space; and (e) contains in itself the cause of space.

1 Kings 8:27—“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.” Space is a creation of God; Rom. 8:39—“nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature.” Zahn, Bib. Dogmatik, 149—“Scripture does not teach the immanence of God in the world, but the immanence of the world in God.” Dante does not put God, but Satan at the centre; and Satan, being at the centre, is crushed with the whole weight of the universe. God is the Being who encompasses all. All things exist in him. E. G. Robinson: “Space is a relation; God is the author of relations and of our modes of thought; therefore God is the author of space. Space conditions our thought, but it does not condition God’s thought.”

Jonathan Edwards: “Place itself is mental, and within and without are mental conceptions.… When I say the material universe exists only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conception of other minds.” H. M. Stanley, on Space and Science, in Philosophical Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full of things, but things are spaceful.… Space is a form of dynamic appearance.” Bradley carries the ideality of space to an extreme, when, in his Appearance and Reality, 35–38, he tells us: Space is not a mere relation, for it has parts, and what can be the parts of a relation? But space is nothing but a relation, for it is lengths of lengths of—nothing that we can find. We can find no terms either inside or outside. Space, to be space, must have space outside itself. Bradley therefore concludes that space is not reality but only appearance.

Immensity is infinity in its relation to space. God’s nature is not subject to the law of space. God is not in space. It is more correct to say that space is in God. Yet space has an objective reality to God. With creation space began to be, and since God sees according to truth, he recognizes relations of space in his creation.

Many of the remarks made in explanation of time apply equally to space. Space is not a substance nor an attribute, but a relation. It exists so soon as extended matter exists, and exists as its necessary condition, whether our minds perceive it or not. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay 2, chap. 9—“Space is not so properly an object of sense, as a necessary concomitant of the objects of sight and touch.” When we see or touch body, we get the idea of space in which the body exists, but the idea of space is not furnished by the sense; it is an a priori cognition of the reason. Experience furnishes the occasion of its evolution, but the mind evolves the conception by its own native energy.

Anselm, Proslogion, 19—“Nothing contains thee, but thou containest all things.” Yet it is not precisely accurate to say that space is in God, for this expression seems to intimate that God is a greater space which somehow includes the less. God is rather unspatial and is the Lord of space. The notion that space and the divine immensity are identical leads to a materialistic conception of God. Space is not an attribute of God, as Clarke maintained, and no argument for the divine existence can be constructed from this premise (see pages 85, 86). Martineau, Types, 1:138, 139, 170—“Malebranche said that God is the place of all spirits, as space is the place of all bodies.… Descartes held that there is no such thing as empty space. Nothing cannot possibly have extension. Wherever extension is, there must be something extended. Hence the doctrine of a plenum, A vacuum is inconceivable.” Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 87—“According to the ordinary view … space exists, and things exist in it; according to our view, only things exist, and between them nothing exists, but space exists in them.”

Case, Physical Realism, 379, 380—“Space is the continuity, or continuous extension, of the universe as one substance.” Ladd: “Is space extended? Then it must be extended in some other space. That other space is the space we are talking about. Space then is not an entity, but a mental presupposition of the existence of extended substance. Space and time are neither finite nor infinite. Space has neither circumference nor centre,—its centre would be everywhere. We cannot imagine space at all. It is simply a precondition of mind enabling us to perceive things.” In Bib. Sao., 1890:415–444, art.: Is Space a Reality? Prof. Mead opposes the doctrine that space is purely subjective, as taught by Bowne; also the doctrine that space is a certain order of relations among realities; that space is nothing apart from things; but that things, when they exist, exist in certain relations, and that the sum, or system, of these relations constitutes space.

We prefer the view of Bowne, Metaphysics, 127, 137, 143, that “Space is the form of objective experience, and is nothing in abstraction from that experience.… It is a form of intuition, and not a mode of existence. According to this view, things are not in space and space-relations, but appear to be. In themselves they are essentially non-spatial; but by their interactions with one another, and with the mind, they give rifle to the appearance of a world of extended things in a common space. Space-predicates, then, belong to phenomena only, and not to things-in-themselves.… Apparent reality exists spatially; but proper ontological reality exists spacelessly and without spatial predicates.” For the view that space to relative, see also Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 66–96; Calderwood, Philos. of the Infinite, 331–335. Per contra, see Porter, Human Intellect, 662; Hazard, Letters on Causation in Willing, appendix; Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:723; Gear, in Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434; Lowndes, Philos. of Primary Beliefs, 144–161.