The Object Dimension: Assumptions

This pair of children’s poems expresses two intuitive ideas implicit in the object dimension of philosophical space. The first verse, which many of us as children were urged to chant back at tormentors, asserts that sticks and stones as material objects have mass, whereas mere names do not and therefore cannot physically injure us. The second poem expresses the idea that objects occupy space and that two different objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. For centuries these two ideas have defined the real, as having mass and occupying space. ‘Whenever there is the body, there is the ākāśa [space/ether]. The body becomes related to the ākāśa because the latter gives room to the former.’2