Let us start with ourselves, and try to imagine a million million miles, and then multiply them by another million million miles, a million million times.  What have we done?  Simply extended our mental yard-stick a certain number of times to an imaginary point in the Nothingness that we call Space.  So far so good, but the mind intuitively recognizes that beyond that imaginary point at the end of the last yard-stick, there is a capacity for an infinite extension of yard-sticks—­an infinite capacity for such extension.  Extension of what?  Space?  No!  Yard-sticks!  Objects!  Things!  Without material objects Space is unthinkable.  It has no existence outside of our consciousness of Things.  There is no such thing as Real Space.  Space is merely an infinite capacity for extending objects.  Space itself is merely a name for Nothingness.  If you can form an idea of an object swept out of existence, and nothing to take its place, that Nothing would be called Space, the term implying the possibility of placing something there without displacing anything else.

Size, of course, is but another form of speaking of Distance.  And in this connection let us not forget that just as one may think of Space being infinite in the direction of largeness, so may we think of it as being infinite in the sense of smallness.  No matter how small may be an object thought of, we are still able to think of it as being capable of subdivision, and so on infinitely.  There is no limit in this direction either.  As Jakob has said:  “The conception of the infinitely minute is as little capable of being grasped by us, as is that of the infinitely great.  Despite this, the admission of the reality of the infinitude, both in the direction of greatness and of minuteness, is inevitable.”

And, as Radenhausen has said:  “The idea of Space is only an unavoidable illusion of our Consciousness, or of our finite nature, and does not exist outside of ourselves; the universe is infinitely small and infinitely great.”

The telescope has opened to us ideas of magnificent vastness and greatness, and the perfected microscope has opened to us a world of magnificent smallness and minuteness.  The latter has shown us that a drop of water is a world of minute living forms who live, eat, fight, reproduce, and die.  The mind is capable of imagining a universe occupying no more space than one million-millionth of the tiniest speck visible under the strongest microscope—­and then imagining such a universe containing millions of suns and worlds similar to our own, and inhabited by living forms akin to ours—­living, thinking men and women, identical in every respect to ourselves.  Indeed, as some philosophers have said, if our Universe were suddenly reduced to such a size—­the relative proportions of everything being preserved, of course—­then we would not be conscious of any change, and life would go on the same, and we would be of the same importance to ourselves and to the Absolute as we are this moment.  And the same would be true were the Universe suddenly enlarged a million-million times.  These changes would make no difference in reality.  Compared with each other, the tiniest speck and the largest sun are practically the same size when viewed from the Absolute.