A Rational Cosmology: The Ubiquitous Qualities of Volume, Length, Width, and Height

Essay XIV

This is Essay XIV of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

Having previously discussed the ubiquitous quality of matter, which all entities must possess, we now proceed to consider other qualities which are universal to all entities: volume, length, width, and height.

Volume- Volume is an entity's expanse. Anything possessing the quality, matter, must have an expanse that corresponds in some proportion (though it could correspond in a variety of proportions) to the amount of the quality "matter" that the entity has.

That is, if the quality " matter" exists in an entity, it must have a real manifestation; this manifestation is volume. If the quality "matter" and the quality "volume" did not coexist and were not inextricably connected, we would encounter absurdities.

Volume without matter does not describe anything whatsoever. It would be just an arbitrarily picked region of space-as-absence, the latter being nothing whatsoever. Matter without volume, too, describes what cannot exist.

This would be tantamount to the quality, matter, existing nowhere, i.e., not existing, and the consequences would be the same: space-as-absence. It is self-evident that both qualities must be present, in some magnitude and combination, in every entity.

Linear Measurements:Length, Width, and Height- A line, in Euclidean geometry, denotes the shortest conceivable path which an entity would need to travel in order to reach any location from any other location.

The linear measurements of an entity are the measurements of those qualities which express the separation of various parts and boundaries of that entity with respect to the shortest conceivable path between them.