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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Excerpts From the Life and Letters of John Locke Relation Space. 1678 Besides the considering things barely and separately in themselves, the mind considers them also with respect, i. e. at the same time looking upon some other, and this we call relation.

So that if the mind so considers anything that another is necessarily supposed, this is relation; there is that which necessarily makes us consider two things at once, or makes the mind look on two things at once, and hence it is that relative terms or words that signify this relation so denominate one thing, as that they always intimate or denote another; viz.

father, countryman, bigger, distant; so that whatsoever necessarily occasions two things, looked on as distinct, this connection in our thoughts of whatsoever it be founded in, that is properly relation, which perhaps may serve to give a little light to that great obscurity which has caused so much dispute about the nature of space, whether it be something or nothing, created or eternal.

For when we speak of space (as ordinarily we do) as the abstract distance, it seems to me to be a pure relation, and we call it distance; but when we consider it as the distance or space between the extremities of a continued body, whose continued parts do, or are supposed to, fill all the interjacent space, we call it extension, and it is looked on to be a positive inherent property of the body, because it keeps constantly with it, always the same, and every particle has its share of it; whereas, whether you consider the body in whole mass, or in the least particles of the body, it appears to me to be nothing but the relation of the distance of the extremities.

But when we speak of space in general, abstract and separate from all consideration of any body at all or any other being; it seems not then to be any real thing, but the consideration of a bare possibility of body to exist: to this, I foresee, there will lie two great objections:- 1st.