ABSTRACT
Others have, unlike Descartes, denied that extension is a substantial determination: some in that they counted it among the accidents of the body, others in that they interpreted it as something that would be neither substance nor accident but would exist for itself in such a way as to stretch out to infinity far beyond the reach of bodies, and form the presupposition for the latters’ existence. This view was held by Locke and Newton. It is clearly untenable, for what else could a thing like the Lockean space be, other than a special sort of substance? The services it is supposed to perform are however quite superfluous. An empty space needs to be something positive just as little as does the absence of a tone when a tone is skipped in playing a scale. Among those who saw spatial extension as an accident of body there belongs Aristotle. Not he, but many of his indirect disciples then conceived extension as standing in addition in a relation of subsistence to other corporeal accidents, as especially to the sensory qualities, use of which was then made by the scholastic theologians in their doctrine of the eucharist. Considered from the point of view that it is demonstrably true that certain accidents serve as subject for other accidents, this would be nothing inconceivable. If however one asks why extension and place were regarded as nonsubstantial differences, then the reason is presumably to be found in the fact that changes of place leave the body, considered for itself, practically unchanged in its peculiarities. Only its proximity to or distance from other bodies is altered thereby. Thus change of place seems so to speak to be the least that a body incurs, whereas one generally understands by
substantial change something peculiarly significant, having as consequence a far-reaching change in the determinations of whatever undergoes it.
