Debate
Leibniz and Clarke on Space, Time and God
1715–1716 · Are space and time realities in their own right or only orders of relations between things – and what does the answer imply about how God acts in the world?
In November 1715 Leibniz warned in a letter to Caroline, Princess of Wales, that natural religion seemed to be decaying in England and that “Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God”. The theologian Samuel Clarke answered for the Newtonian side; five papers by Leibniz and five replies by Clarke passed through Caroline until Leibniz’s death in November 1716, and Clarke published the exchange in 1717. How far Newton himself helped to write Clarke’s replies is still debated. Conducted in the shadow of the priority dispute over the calculus, the correspondence became a founding text for the philosophy of space and time and for the question of how a creator relates to a world governed by laws.
Positions
Absolute space and an ever-active God
Clarke holds that space and time are real and infinite: space is “not a substance, but a property”, a consequence of the existence of an omnipresent God, and Newton called it God’s sensorium only “as it were”. Against the principle of sufficient reason Clarke argues that the reason why something is so rather than otherwise “is oft-times no other, than the mere will of God”. A world running like a clock without God would be “the notion of materialism and fate”; that God goes on governing it shows his wisdom, not a defect. Gravitation is no miracle either: its means may be invisible, but what acts regularly and constantly may well be called natural.
Held by
- Isaac Newton1643–1727
Space as an order of relations
Leibniz holds space to be “something merely relative, as time is” – “an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions” (Third Paper, 1716). If space were an absolute reality, God would have had no reason to place the world where it is rather than shifted, or with east and west exchanged; since the two would be indiscernible, there would be nothing to choose. Behind this stand the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles: no two things in nature are perfectly alike. A God who must mend his watch from time to time would be an imperfect maker, and bodies attracting each other at a distance without any means would be “a supernatural thing”.
Held by
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1646–1716
Neither substance nor mere relation? Later answers
Kant argued in 1768, from “incongruent counterparts” such as a left and a right hand, that space has a reality of its own; from 1770 he held that space and time are neither substances nor relations between things in themselves, but forms of human intuition. Mach (The Science of Mechanics, 1883) rejected absolute space as beyond experience and suggested that its supposed effects might arise from motion relative to the distant masses of the universe. Einstein, who named this idea “Mach’s principle” in 1918, hoped that general relativity would fulfil it but later distanced himself from it; in 1954 he wrote that one should no longer speak of it at all. Whether the theory favours relational or absolute views of spacetime is still disputed.
Held by
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804
- Ernst Mach1838–1916
- Albert Einstein1879–1955
Read more
- Samuel Clarke (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Absolute and Relational Space and Motion: Classical Theories (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Absolute and Relational Space and Motion: Post-Newtonian Theories (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Mr. Leibniz’s First Paper, from Clarke’s Collection of Papers, 1717 (The Newton Project)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made