In metaphysics, extension is, roughly speaking, the property of "taking up space". René Descartes defines extension as the property of existing in more than one dimension. For Descartes, the primary characteristic of matter is extension, just as the primary characteristic of mind is consciousness.
For John Locke, extenstion is "only the space that lies between the extremities of the solid coherent parts" of a body. It is the space possessed by a body.
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Metaphysical idealism is the view that everything known is mind, or some mental state or other, which some idealists suppose to require a substantial soul, others not; while all agree that body has no different being apart from mind.
The crux of all metaphysical idealism is the difficulty of reconciling the unity of the object with the plurality of subjects.
Lotze's metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism.
Metaphysics, in so far as it treats of immaterial beings, is called special metaphysics and is divided into rational psychology, which treats of the human soul, rational theology, which treats of the existence and attributes of God, and cosmology, which treats of the ultimate principles of the universe.
The condition of metaphysics is, indeed, such as to invite the contempt and provoke the disdain of the scientist; the fault, however, may lie not so much in the claims of metaphysics as in the vagaries of the metaphysicians.
On the one hand, Bacon, while himself retaining the name metaphysics to designate the science of the essential properties of bodies, is opposed to the metaphysical philosophy of the scholastics, and chiefly because that philosophy gave too much prominence to final causes and the study of the mind.
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