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matter how reality had turned out—empty, full, whatever—it was metaphysically guaranteed to include Monsieur Bergson; that he himself was a God-like necessary being. To call this solipsism would be charitable.
    There is a second argument against nothingness that, though similar in its logic, runs along more objective lines. Like the observer argument, it too says that our effort to imagine absolute nothingness is doomed to be only partial, never complete. But instead of pointing to consciousness as the thing left over, it cites a residuum that is nonmental. Even when all the contents of the cosmos have been imaginatively banished, the argument goes, we are always left with the abstract setting that they inhabited. This setting may be empty, but it is not nothing. A container with no contents is still a container. Let’s call this the “container argument” against nothingness.
    One venerable exponent of the container argument is Bede Rundle, a contemporary philosopher at Oxford. “ Our attempt to think away everything amounts to envisaging a region of space which has been evacuated of its every occupant, an exercise which gives no more substance to the possibility of there being nothing than does envisaging an empty cupboard,” Rundle has written (in a book tellingly titled Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing ). And just what is this “empty cupboard”? Rundle appears to be identifying it with space itself. Since one cannot “think away” the presence of space, he suggests, it must be part of any possible reality—a necessary existent, like God, or Henri Bergson’s inner self.
    So is space to be our great bulwark against nothingness? Rundle hedges his bets. At one point he considers an alternative argument, to the effect that the very idea of nothingness is incoherent. If there were nothing, then it would have been a fact that there was nothing. So at least one thing would exist after all: that fact! (This is a truly terrible argument; the enumeration of its fallacies is left as an exercise for the reader.) But it is space that Rundle keeps coming back to, since he just can’t think it away, try as he might. “ Space is not nothing ,” he insists, “it is something you can stare into or travel through, something of which there can be volumes.”
    Not everyone shares Rundle’s conviction that space is a something. Among philosophers, there are two competing views of what space actually is. (To be scientifically up-to-date, we should be talking about “spacetime” rather than “space,” but no matter.) One of them, the substantival view, goes back to Newton. It holds that space is indeed a real thing, with its own intrinsic geometry, and that it would continue to exist even if all its contents vanished. The other view of space, the relational view, goes back to Newton’s great rival, Leibniz. It holds that space is not a thing unto itself, but merely a web of relations among things. Space could no more exist apart from the things that it relates, on Leibniz’s view, than the grin of the Cheshire Cat could exist apart from the feline itself.
    The ontological debate between the Newtonians and the Leibnizians continues to the present day, and it’s a lively one. Relativity theory, in which spacetime affects the behavior of matter, has tipped the balance somewhat in favor of the substantivalists.
    But it’s not necessary to resolve this debate to see whether the container argument is any good. Suppose the relationists are right, and space is just a convenient theoretical fiction. In that case, if the contents of the cosmos were to vanish, space would vanish along with them, leaving absolute nothingness.
    Now suppose, contrariwise, that the substantivalists are right. Suppose that space is a genuine cosmic arena, with an existence all its own. Then this arena could survive the disappearance of its material contents. Even with everything gone, there would still be unoccupied positions. But if space