point: 'When I am quietly seated, and another, going a thousand paces away, is flushed with fatigue, it is certainly he who moves and I who am at rest.'[1]
But if there is absolute motion, is it possible to persist in regarding movement as nothing but a change of place? We should thenIf there are any real movements, they cannot be merely changes of positions. have to make diversity of place into an absolute difference, and distinguish absolute positions in an absolute space. Newton[2] went as far as this, followed moreover by Euler[3] and by others. But can this be imagined, or even conceived? A place could be absolutely distinguished from another place only by its quality or by its relation to the totality of space: so that space would become, on this hypothesis, either composed of heterogeneous parts or finite. But to finite space we should give another space as boundary, and beneath heterogeneous parts of space we should imagine an homogeneous space as its foundation: in both cases it is to homogeneous and indefinite space that we should necessarily return. We cannot, then, hinder ourselves either from holding every place to be relative, or from believing some motion to be absolute.
It may be urged that real movement is distinguished from relative movement in that it
