Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...contradictory to speak of an existing infinite number. Infinite divisibility denotes a process, but not a state. Such is the solution of Gersonides. It rids us at once of the haunting ghost of Zeno which continued to appear as soon as we had infinite divisibility on our lips. Gersonides showed us how to make of it an intelligible theory. We are now ready to draw a line under the first general inquiry of our work. The problems that so far occupied our attention are connected with the conception of empirical space, i. e. with that part of space which has.embodied itself in concrete tangible matter, and has become therefore an object of experience. We have seen how the Jewish thinkers never doubted the independent objective reality of space as presented to their senses. They differed as to its ontological importance in the make-up of things, they took issues as to its accidental or substantial nature, but no one questioned its independent existence. Thus the Kantian view of the subjectivity of space, which puts all extensity at the mercy of our senses, is far removed from the Jewish standpoint. Some thinkers, we have seen, even go to the extreme in maintaining that space is the sum and substance of all material existence, the substantial groundwork of all things. Perhaps this distinctly empirical standpoint is somewhat responsible for the general Jewish opposition to Arabian atomism with its assumption of a real yet spaceless particle as the basis of the material world. At any rate, Jewish thinkers all upheld the indestructibility of extension by means of division, that space is infinitely divisible--a theory the tremendous difficulties of which were altogether removed by Gersonides, who showed that the notion of infinite divisibility...
