Space and place

Use in the book

The account on II.710–711 explicitly calls space the common place containing all places and bodies. Its repeated necessity connects it with movement, existence, placement, and displacement; air is then an image of space rather than a replacement definition. Another passage defines time through movement over space, using the billiard table and ball before turning to the pulse.

Poetry brings out a different contrast. A poem requires three worlds and little matter precisely because it needs so much space; the real is said to diminish place. Definition, in the undated appendix, circumscribes a bodiless object in a space without reality. Physical, imaginative, and verbal spaces consequently need to remain distinguishable, even when the vocabulary links them.

Places to read

1. II, p. 711, entry begun p. 710, no. 11, ¶2Space contains particular places and makes movements and placements possible.
2. I, p. 457, entry 3, ¶3Time is pictured as movement over space.
3. II, p. 487, entry begun p. 486, no. 14, ¶3The poem’s imaginative extent contrasts with material filling.
4. II, p. 917, entry 1, ¶1Definition circumscribes a bodiless object in unreal space.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves space/place distinctions. At II.711 several clipped words have qualified bracketed English readings; the lexicon relies on those qualifications and does not restore the damaged French. The appendix supplies no invented entry date.