IX. That corporeal substance, when distinguished from its quantity,
is confusedly conceived as something incorporeal.
Although perhaps some express themselves otherwise on this matter, I
am nevertheless convinced that they do not think differently from
what I have now said: for when they distinguish (corporeal)
substance from extension or quantity, they either mean nothing by
the word (corporeal) substance, or they form in their minds merely a
confused idea of incorporeal substance, which they falsely attribute
to corporeal, and leave to extension the true idea of this corporeal
substance; which extension they call an accident, but with such
impropriety as to make it easy to discover that their words are not
in harmony with their thoughts.
X. What space or internal place is.
Space or internal place, and the corporeal substance which is
comprised in it, are not different in reality, but merely in the
mode in which they are wont to be conceived by us. For, in truth,
the same extension in length, breadth, and depth, which constitutes
space, constitutes body; and the difference between them lies only
in this, that in body we consider extension as particular, and
conceive it to change with the body; whereas in space we attribute
to extension a generic unity, so that after taking from a certain
space the body which occupied it, we do not suppose that we have at
the same time removed the extension of the space, because it appears
to us that the same extension remains there so long as it is of the
same magnitude and figure, and preserves the same situation in
respect to certain bodies around it, by means of which we determine
this space.
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