ABSTRACT
Newtonian space was the correlate of Newtonian things. Newtonian mechanics, in fact, is entirely relativistic as regards time, space, and uniform motion in a straight line. Newton distinguishes time, space, place and motion into "Absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common". Absolute space is the concomitant of atoms, corpuscles, absolute things, which enables them to be different and to become different. Space is where atoms can be. G. W. Leibniz complained that Newton's God was arbitrary: but so is a modern mathematician. An n- dimensional continuous space is a set of all the points that can be characterized by a set of n real numbers, or, more abstractly, it is a set of ordered n-tuplets of real numbers. The interplay between arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness constitutes the theme of our treatment of space. Space, philosopher's space, is thus far defined only "up to" these rather minimal requirements.
