ABSTRACT
Early modern philosophical psychologists tended to be Cartesian dualists. They accounted for how we perceive spatial qualities and relations by appealing to innate ideas or operations performed on sensations that they took to be purely qualitative and disposed only in time. There were two exceptions. Hume and Kant took space to be a “manner” or “form” in which sensations are given or “intuited.” For Hume, the thesis that visual and tactile sensations are disposed in space is packaged with the thesis that empty space is inconceivable. The former does not entail the latter. Hume grounded it on a prior rejection of the infinite divisibility of space. This chapter argues that Hume had a good case for taking our visual and tactile perceptions to be only finitely divisible, but not for taking space to be only finitely divisible. It further argues that his principal reason for rejecting the conceivability of empty space, an argument from the non-entity of unqualified points, rests on a composition fallacy. Hume’s independent case for considering space to be a “manner of disposition” of coloured and tangible points made a plausible, though neglected contribution to the theory of spatial perception.
