书摘
"John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that human beings can know only those things that could be sensed: felt, smelled, seen, heard. If space was now empty, what could fill it? Where were the spirits, saints, and demons in whom most Westerners still believed? Where were the nether regions to which souls must depart? The deeply religious Isaac Newton said that space is the 'sensorium' of God. In 1715–16, the German philosopher and co-inventor of the calculus, G. Leibniz, replied in a famous correspondence with Newton's follower, Samuel Clarke, that such a notion of God having a sensorium, an organ of sensation, was absurd. The new science of Galileo and Newton left the issue of the relationship between God and the universe, between spirit and matter, between space and bodies, profoundly unsettled."————玛格丽特·雅各布《世俗启蒙:启蒙运动如何改变日常生活》(Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment, Princeton UP, 2019,第 1 章 "The Setting",第 32 页)