10. Spatium. This is the main term for space in
classical Latin, and it has given rise to space (English),
espace (French), spazio (Italian), espacio (Spanish), etc.
The common Teutonic stem ruum, which gave rise to
English room and German Raum, had no lexical spread
of comparable compass.
Within Western civilization, with spatium, began a
widespread imposition of the vocabulary of space on
the parallel conception of time. Thus Cicero uses the
expression spatium praeteriti temporis, in the meaning
of: “the space (i.e., interval) of time gone by,” and his
usage has the ease of a colloquialism. Furthermore,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term
space in English had from the first, that is since around
1300, two meanings, a temporal and a spatial, and the
Dictionary lists the temporal meaning first. A corre-
sponding French Dictionary (Paul Robert, 3, 1703) also
lists both meanings for espace, and it observes that from
the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries the temporal
meaning was the leading one. Spanish and Italian
dictionaries also have both meanings, and, according
to one of them, spazio occurs in a temporal meaning
in the Purgatory of Dante and in a story of Boccaccio.
(Niccolò Tommaseo, Dizionario della lingua italiana,
Turin [1915], 6, 135).
Yet, two thousand years after Cicero, the fin-de-siècle
philosopher Henri Bergson was able to build a career
and reputation on an intellectual opposition to the
quantitative subordination of time to space (J. A. Gunn,
Ch. 6). He was pressing his conceptions of durée, élan
vital, évolution créatrice, etc. into a lifelong campaign
for reconstituting the data of human consciousness in
their original intuition that was free from the idea of
space and from the scientific notion of time; and he
was apparently greatly admired for this by many.
Bergson's finding, which so alarmed him, that time
is dominated by space is not even correct. The true
fact is that both space and time are dominated by one
common paradigm, namely the mathematical linear
continuum, which in the early part of Bergson's career
had just been perfected by Richard Dedekind and
Georg Cantor; and the seemingly spatial vocabulary
is in fact a joint mathematical one. Aristotle in his
Physica, in the context of Zeno's paradoxes, had stated
over and over again, in words of his own, that there
must be a common paradigm for space and time if
there is to be any conception of movement at all. Also,
for Aristotle, movement in a broad sense, which he
termed kinesis, separated the animate from the
inanimate, and without kinesis there would be no soul,
and thus no kind of consciousness or intuition. For
Aristotle, space (and time) were features of what he
viewed as “nature.” He did not have a space (or time)
of perception, but he also could not imagine any kind
of perception without a suitable kinesis, and for the
latter (his) space and time, in coordination, were
undoubtedly prerequisite. Whatever will endure of
Bergson's philosophy, his opposition to a coordination
of space and time will not.
