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 Some Views of the; Time Problem 
 
 A T;ISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 
 
 ANn lttcratukl; 
 
 Dfi ■ I JIN'. ■'>B PHU-OSOPIIY 
 
 BY 
 
 BENJAMIN ;V. VAN RIPER 
 
 MEN ASH A, WISCONSIN 
 
 GEORGE BANTA PL'BiJSHING COMPANY 
 igi6 
 
®ljp IniufrBitg of (Eliiragn 
 
 Some Views of the Time Problem 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 
 
 AND LITERATURE 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 BENJAMIN W. VAN RIPER 
 
 MENASHA, WISCONSIN 
 
 GEORGE BANTA ^^ 3LISHIVG COMPANY 
 1916 
 
CONTENTS 
 PARTI 
 
 The General Issue 
 
 I. Introduction 5 
 
 1. History of the philosophical idea of time 6 
 
 II. Effect of the Doctrine of Evolution on the Problem 
 
 1. Change and time 11 
 
 2. The philosophical vs. the scientific problem 12 
 
 3. The idea that change may be of relations only 17 
 
 4. Time and change are correlative 20 
 
 III. The Relativity of Time; the Specious Present 
 
 1. Of our estimates of time 23 
 
 2 . The relativity of time itself to consciousness 25 
 
 3. The objective fundamentum of the time series 27 
 
 4. Kant on the time direction 28 
 
 5 . The question of the irreversibility of the series 30 
 
 6. "Idealistic Eternalism" 34 
 
 IV. The Metaphysical Character of Time 
 
 1. Not an ontological continuum 36 
 
 2. Its infinity and infinite divisibility 37 
 
 V. The Relation of "the Present" to Change 
 
 1. The specious present the only real one 40 
 
 2. Is there one "present" or many? 43 
 
 Ladd vs. Bradley 
 
 VI. On the Universality and Necessity of the Time Relation 46 
 
 5 J o o 
 
PART II 
 
 A Comparison of the Views of Time held by Professor Eucken and 
 
 Bergson 
 
 A. Processor Eucken's Conception 53 
 
 I. Moral Argument for the Existence of the Timeless "Geistes- 
 
 leben" 54 
 
 II. The Presupposition of Timelessness in Knowledge and Truth... 56 
 
 III. His Conception of the "Present" 59 
 
 IV. The Implications of a Real History 61 
 
 B. Professor Bercson's Conception 67 
 
 I. His Theory of the Intellect as a " Spatializer" , 68 
 
 II. His Disproof of the Idea of Intensive Magnitude 71 
 
 1. Itsrelationtothequality of conscious states 72 
 
 2. Its explanation by an unnumerical multiplicity 76 
 
 III. Is Conceptual Time Identical WITH Space? 78 
 
 1. If only one form of homogeneity is possible 79 
 
 2. And if space is that form 81 
 
 C. The Relation of Bercson's "Duree Pure" to the Timeless- 
 
 ness OF Eucki;n's " Geistesleben" 84 
 
 I. Its Function in Perception 84 
 
 II. Pure Memory AND the " Geistige Gegenwart" 85 
 
 HI. Succession and the Consciousness of Succession 86 
 
 rV. Degrees of Duration and of Timelessness 89 
 
 V. Relation of Spirit to Art 91 
 
 VI. Circumstantial Considerations 92 
 
 1. Both men accused of dualism 
 
 2. Bergson made out an "eternalist" by opposing writers 
 
 3. Relation of time order to cause and effect 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 The vast amount of discussion that has centered, in modern thought, 
 around the idea of evolution and development, has almost raised anew 
 the whole ancient problem of the nature of time and the slightly less 
 ancient one of its relation to experience. The "Absolutist" is sure 
 there is nothing in his view of the world that is in any way inconsistent 
 with the fact of development in the concrete realm of phenomena; the 
 "Evolutionist" is equally sure that the Absolutist denies in one breath 
 what he affirms in the next. The Absolutist insists that to regard 
 change and development as ultimate makes the very conception of such 
 a thing impossible and absurd; the Evolutionist replies that to refuse 
 to do so is to stamp the whole vast fact as illusion and sham. This debate 
 may safely be regarded as the central interest in present philosophical 
 discussion. 
 
 Professor Windelband has summed up the essential effort of Greek 
 philosophy as the search for M'hat is changeless. The cause of change 
 and flux must be, in the last analysis, it seemed, a changeless ground; 
 and to find this ground of things — whether by slow process of inference 
 or by happy guess — is the ruling problem of ancient thought. Of course, 
 it turns out to be a difficult logical exercise to deduce change from prem- 
 ises that do not contain it, or vice versa; and so it generally transpires that 
 either change or permanence must be condemned in toto as illusion. 
 But however intimately time and change may be related, it is evident- 
 that the problem in this simple form scarcely touches the question of 
 the nature of time, since both sides assume it as real without inquiring 
 the conditions of its being so. Temporal change and temporal change- 
 lessness are each essentially temporal affairs, and the Eleatics, quite as 
 much as the Heracleitics, assume the reality of time. Of course, the change 
 that is involved in time itself (change of future to past, etc.) is .real 
 change; but this the Eleatics, with all their passion for changelessness, 
 did not think to deny, — and for the good reason, too, that their very 
 conception of changelessness implied that minimum amount of change! 
 They opposed a succession of similar moments to a succession of dis- 
 similar ones, and this says nothing of the nature of succession itself. 
 
 Plato^ and Aristotle approach nearest to the modern problem. The 
 former became, in his later philosophy, a little suspicious of his owti 
 
 * Timaeus, pp. 37-39; Parmenides, pp. 141, 152 f.; Laws, 676; Republic, x, 608; 
 Phacdo, 107 (Jowett Tr.). 
 
O SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 earlier attempts to get change into the world of things through the simple 
 participation of empty space in the changeless Ideas, and provided his 
 Demiurge to facilitate the difficult transition. But even here the princi- 
 ples of change and changelessness are given no essentially new form. 
 To be sure, he condemns the world of "time" as inferior and unreal, 
 but the "eternal" world with which he contrasts it is still a realm of 
 temporal changelessness, — not a "timeless" existence in the modern 
 sense of the word. In some translations at least he is even made to 
 speak of his world of Ideas as "timeless," but there is no obvious reason 
 in the context, nor in the whole general drift of his thought, to regard 
 this as anything essentially different from the older Eleatic temporal 
 identity. 
 
 Aristotle^ narrowly escapes the modern problem. Change and move- 
 ment he understands as characteristic of imperfertion. In the struggle 
 of matter to realize form there is change and all that it implies. But 
 in the highest heaven there is only form, pure and changeless, and this 
 eternal principle gives reality to the lower world. So, as Professor 
 Bergson^ has remarked, the pure form of Aristotle's philosophy is related 
 to the material world as eternity is related to time. But so far all this 
 theory of the eternal may still be interpreted simply as temporal lack 
 of change, — just as in the case of Plato. But once at least Aristotle 
 becomes dissatisfied with this simple alternative. He suggests that 
 change and movement are not enough to make the reality of time, — 
 that before time can be real the change must be "nombre" and this 
 implies consciousness! In which case there could be no such thing as 
 time, if the soul did not exist. This, he considered, did not make time 
 absolutely relative since the soul possessed necessary reality. But his 
 suggestion does contain the conception that time is relative to con- 
 sciousness. Unfortunately, however, he did not follow out the idea to 
 its consequences and so, however great may be the charm of finding 
 the beginnings of everything in Greece, we must still admit that Aristotle 
 was not a Kantian transcendentalist ! 
 
 From Aristotle to modern times, perhaps even to Hume and Kant, 
 there occurred no systematic development of the time problem. One 
 finds many brilliant isolated conceptions but little tendency to emphasize 
 them, even on the part of the philosophers themselves from whom they 
 
 ^ Physics, iv, ii, 14, etc. Metaphysics, p. 309 ff. (McMahon's Tr.). 
 ' L. Constant, Cotirs de M. Bergson sur Vhisloire de I'idee de Temps, Revue de Phi- 
 losophie. Jan. 1904 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 7 
 
 came. The Christian conception of eternal life in the future involves 
 no new concept of time as such. Indeed, the very fact that it is located 
 in the future, shows how far it is removed from a conception of timeless 
 presence. (Cf., however, an article by Mr. McTaggert^ in Mind for 
 1909, on the claim that real timelessness may properly be regarded as 
 past or future!) And, of course, the chief concern of the middle age was 
 with this very world view, so that the philosophy of the whole period 
 makes the same general assumption of the ultimate fact of time that 
 characterized the Christian and Greek conceptions. Of the isolated 
 individual conceptions we need notice only a few of the more important. 
 
 In Plotinus there is the same sort of vagueness and ambiguity that 
 one learns to expect from mystics in general. To be sure he looked up 
 to an intense ecstatic state of unity with the Ultimate as the completest 
 state of existence possible to man, and in this sort of experience particular 
 relations of time and place tend to melt away. And, on the other hand, 
 the content of this higher life spreads its details out in time. But in 
 spite of this terminology, I doubt that it can at all be interpreted as a 
 theory of timelessness. (1) Of course, time as such is not real for 
 consciousness in such a state of mind; but then no particular thing 
 whatever is at that time real as distinguished from other things, because 
 there is no distinguishing activity going on there. Time is no exception 
 to this rule, but neither, on the other hand, is it a distinct problem. 
 So to say that Plotinus considered time as merely a phenomenal relation- 
 ship would be like saying that, since Thales regarded everything as made 
 of water, he must have regarded space and time as aqueous entities!'' 
 And (2) the god of Plotinus is to all intents and purposes, the Ideal 
 World of Plato, the eternity of which we have already construed as 
 really only infinite time in a world where change is forbidden. Plotinus, 
 if this be true, does not progress so far as Aristotle toward a really ideal- 
 istic view of time. 
 
 There can be no doubt that St. Augustine'' saw distinctly the great 
 difficulties in the way of a systematic view of time. Here for the first 
 time appear many of the haunting paradoxes in which subsequent 
 philosophy has found it such a pleasure to revel and which, too, it has 
 taken a century or so of modern thought to dispel. The fact that a 
 temporal world cannot exist in a durationless present is itself, if taken 
 
 * Art., Relation of Time and Eternity. 
 
 ' Cf., however, the article D}^ Henry Sturt, in Vol. 25 of the Encyclopedia Brilannka, 
 on Space and Time. 
 
 ' Confessions, Book xi, Ch. 14, 15, 16. 
 
5 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 seriously, a final blow to any mechanical or mathematical view of time. 
 This, evidently, Augustine saw very plainly, although he did not go far 
 toward a solution. The world was not rescued from the danger of 
 annihilation with which a geometrical present threatened it until, in 
 modern times, time was made a derivative of consciousness. This 
 procedure Augustine anticipated at least to the extent of seeking in 
 psychic phenomena a solution for his difficulties. It does not seem to 
 have occurred to him to ask what sort of existence he would have, in 
 that case, to attribute to consciousness itself. And this, of course, 
 would have to be included in any complete view of time. 
 
 With the beginnings of modern thought we find a growing suspicion, 
 even among the Neo-Platonists,'' that the bare, abstract identities of 
 Plato are powerless to supply real change and process. Bruno and 
 Nicolas de Cusa look to the principle of vitality to carry over from 
 one event to another. The world is a living being and so, like us, can 
 grow and grow older. Kepler escapes the identities of the Greeks in a 
 doctrine of active force; and Bendetti, according to Bergson, showed, 
 as against Aristotle, that the idea of movement is no longer absurd, if 
 one agrees to the existence of an inner life through change. In all this 
 there is the tendency to appeal to one's own inner experience to settle 
 the problem of the outer world, — the tendency that has been so charac- 
 teristic of modern thought. But it is also evident that these early 
 attempts touch upon the time problem only indirectly through that of 
 causality and change. But even that is enough to make their contri- 
 bution noteworthy. 
 
 Descartes^ stands at the turn in the road. His physics of the outer 
 world is essentially Greek. It is systematic and clear-cut. His dealing 
 with consciousness is original and empirical. This finds complete 
 expression in his hopeless dualism of mind and matter. Unfortunately 
 for the development of our problem, time fell, in his opinion, wholly on the 
 side of extension rather than on that of thought. He therefore regarded 
 it as essentially equivalent to the movement and change of that outer 
 world. Most of his followers developed this phase of his philosophy 
 at the expense of his more dynamic conception of the world of con- 
 sciousness, which might have been more fruitful. And there has been 
 no lack in recent years of philosophers who, in a similar way, identify 
 time with change and movement. Whether such an identification can 
 
 ^ Cf. above, Constant's report on Bergson. 
 
 * Oeuvres, Vol. iii, pp. 97-99, Letter to Vatier, Nov. 1643. 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 9 
 
 be successfully carried through is a different matter, — one which can 
 hardly be discussed here. 
 
 Spinoza's'' abstract logical world would have admitted beautifully 
 of interpretation in terms of ultimate timelessness, but if he ever explic- 
 itly held that conception he did not work out at any length its relation 
 to consciousness or the world. To be sure there would be no change 
 in the simple logical interdependence of the elements of his world, but 
 this was also true of the ideal world of Plato. And mere lack of change 
 in things is by no means synonymous with a transcendence of time 
 relations. And if Spinoza came within sight of the latter it was soon 
 lost to view in his supreme effort to overcome Descartes' dualism. 
 
 But Leibnitz^" took the question more seriously and drew some 
 conclusions of his own. With him the outer, merely mechanical world 
 of Descartes disappears and all reality is regarded as having innerness, — 
 if not always consciousness, at least something analogous to it. And 
 time turns out, even in his world of preestablished harmony and devel- 
 opment, to depend upon the finitude of knowing subjects whose range is 
 limited. For the Monad of monads who can see the whole infinite 
 connection of things at once, there is no final or existential development. 
 It is evident that this, if carried out to its ultimate consequences, ap- 
 proaches very closely to Kant's conception of the transcendent character 
 of the ego, — so far, of course, as time is concerned. Otherwise there are 
 fundamental differences that almost obscure what similarity there is 
 between the two theories. And on the other hand, perhaps this very 
 similarity in their views of time as relative to consciousness is partly to 
 be accounted for by the fact that through Wolff, Kant was early brought 
 under the influence of Leibnitz. And we must also notice that this 
 same brief suggestion of Leibnitz anticipates the whole conception of 
 the psychological present as it has been worked out in recent thought, — 
 especially by Professor James and Professor Royce. 
 
 The mechanical side of Descartes' theory reached, perhaps, its most 
 famous expression in the work of Sir Isaac Newton," and to a less degree 
 his predecessor Clark. Newton accepted the theory or concept of 
 time as a simple phase of the outer, mechanical order, — a sort of continu- 
 um existing in its own right and moving at a perfectly constant velocity. 
 All our measurements of time are ultimately measurements of move- 
 
 ^ Spinoza, Meta. Cog., C. 4 and Elhica, pp. 2, 270-276. 
 
 " Works of L. (Duncan's Tr.), p. 244 ff. and Russell, Phil, of Leibnitz, pp. 127-130. 
 
 " Priniipia, Ed. 1714, pp. 5, 7, etc. 
 
10 SOME VIEWS or THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 ment, but time is the independent variable. It is only with reference 
 to the constancy of the time flow that movement itself can be called 
 uniform or irregular. Time is thus independent both of consciousness 
 and of the varying changes of tilings. In short, we have in this theory the 
 mechanical, geometrical conception with a vengeance. On the other 
 hand, it must be borne in mind that Newton's interest was primarily 
 in physical science where, at present at least, one deals explicitly in 
 abstractions. Newton's conception is essentially that of the infinitesmal 
 calculus, and must always remain the working assumption of abstract 
 mathematics. But in order that the mathematics shall be true one 
 does not need to assume the absolute existence of this abstract time any 
 more than of logarithms or differentials. 
 
 Hume's^^ dismal failure to derive the concept of time from simple 
 "impressions" is too familiar to need discussion. It is important in the 
 history of thought, along with some other theories of Hume's chiefly in 
 that it may have helped to awaken Immanuel Kant^^ from his "dogmatic 
 C. slumber" and so led to his revolutionary conception of the absolute 
 C relativity of time to the synthetic function of consciousness. And this 
 latter theory has so dominated the philosophy of the last century that 
 any adequate mention of its multitudinous phases would be quite out 
 of the question here. In Germany especially, apart from a certain 
 semi-popular "left wing" now more or less rapidly disappearing, Kant's 
 Kritik has remained the one supreme classic. One of the most remark- 
 able things about the Heidelberg Congress a few years ago was its revela- 
 tion of the great strength of the present Neo-Kantian tendency. And if, 
 outside of Germany, respect for the classical tradition is not so strong, 
 this much at least is true, that the problem has remained in about the 
 form in which he stated it, however widely solutions may differ. When 
 it is clearly seen that the idea of time is neither a sensation nor a com- 
 bination of sensations, we are facing it from the direction of Kant's 
 Kritik, whether we accept his complete table of categories or not. We 
 shall, therefore, consider that with him we have reached the modern 
 statement of the problem. 
 
 It was indicated at the beginning of this review that the notion of 
 evolution that has so powerfully dominated the past half-century, has 
 set the time problem in the very foreground. Now it is interesting to 
 notice in connection with what we have said of Kant that he himself was 
 
 '* Treatise, pp. 26-68. 
 
 " Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 24-33 (IMullcr's Tr.). 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 11 
 
 a pioneer in evolution theory. His vision was not limited to the scholas- 
 tic cosmology that embraced something over six thousand years. Long 
 before Laplace, Kant caught sight of the endless stellar past, and saw the 
 solar system develop from a swirl of nebulae. Kant then, at any rate, 
 did not regard a cosmic evolution as at all inconsistent with his epis- 
 temological theory that time is a product of the synthetic unity of apper- 
 ception. And with this the question at once presents itself. How are we 
 to look upon this implied division of labor between science and philosophy, 
 when they come so near dealing with the same problem? 
 
 The effort to distinguish clearly between the philosophical and the 
 scientific problem, and to understand the relation between the two, 
 is a strictly modern product. The earlier Greeks thought nothing of 
 having a cosmological theory that was in fiat contradiction to their 
 metaphysis. The former was "opinion"; it was inductive, realistic, 
 concrete, sensory: the latter was "truth"; it was deductive, rational. 
 The cosmology could be understood by anybody; the real truth only by 
 the initiated. Even Parmenides had highly complex teachings as to 
 the movements of the heavenly bodies; on the other hand he was perfectly 
 certain from a "rational" standpoint that motion was quite impossible. 
 And if many people even today seem to have analogous water-tight 
 compartments in their minds, we shall probably have to admit that it is 
 a more sophisticated distinction, not a naive one. But we have not 
 yet told the whole story. Not only did the ancient and medieval thinkers 
 entertain at the same time a priori " truth " and scientific "opinion," 
 but they complicated matters generally by the introduction of an a priori 
 science which therefore occupied a sort of intermediate position so far 
 as subject-matter and general validity was concerned. It was in this 
 a priori science, however, that the evolution theory in modern times 
 arose." On the side of "pure" philosophical thought there had been, 
 since the time of Plato, no room for talk of ontological development; 
 the orthodox thinkers were bound by the whole movement of history to 
 deny that change could be ultimate. But, it seems, from every other 
 manner of man there came now and then suggestions of world develop- 
 ment of a more or less definite sort, which found expression in Astronomy, 
 Botany, Biology, etc., as well as in philosophies such as that of Leibnitz 
 mentioned above. 
 
 " Cf. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin. 
 
12 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 It was not until the year 1859 that empirical science came forth with 
 a clear-cut hypothesis of evolution and, along with that, a good supply 
 of evidence to base it on; it was in this year that Darwin published his 
 masterpiece. Until there was evidence of the fact of evolution, it mooted 
 little for the enthusiasts of the closet to cry their evolutionary wares; 
 on the other side the conservatives of the cloister displayed an equally 
 a priori array of fixities and immutables, neither competitor making a 
 visible attempt to weight his airy productions with the concrete value of 
 established fact. A few decades before the time of Darwin, however, 
 the method of inductive science began to make an impression on the 
 exterior of this ancient problem, — but on the exterior only. The facts 
 (the observable positions and motions of the bodies of the solar system) 
 admitted easily of such a genetic explanation, but the genesis, the progress, 
 did not show up in the facts themselves. Lamarck and Laplace con- 
 tributed facts and suggestions for explaining them, — chiefly, however, 
 suggestions. But it was left to Darwin, through his prodigious capacity 
 for patient investigation, to set forth in an orderly and systematized 
 manner all the facts that were literally obtainable in his day, and suggest 
 in outline the history of a measureless past as he read it in the organiza- 
 tion, habits, structure, and embryonic development of living individuals 
 and in the stratified archives of rock. Here was material that needed 
 only arrangement and it would tell its own story; and to Darwin belongs 
 the credit, not only of bringing to light vastly more of this material than 
 had been accumulated in the centuries that preceded him, but also of 
 arranging it in a simple and convincing scheme. 
 
 As a bare matter of history the world has thought so well of this 
 work that at present to be familiar with its main outlines is a requisite 
 of even an ordinary education. And more than that, the idea of devel- 
 opment has become, to a very large extent, the organizing principle of 
 the whole field of natural science, including even psychology and the 
 sociological side of ethics. The complete scientific explanation of any 
 fact must include an account of its origin. 
 
 Now it is impossible that so sweeping a change as this in the field 
 of natural science should be a matter of indifference to philosophy. 
 Many of the cardinal conceptions of the established philosophy had their 
 rise centuries before scientific evolution was dreamed of, and might easily 
 be quite inconsistent with the new way of regarding things. No literate 
 person seriously questions any longer the general truth of scientific 
 evolution. That is accepted; and if any of the conclusions of philosophy 
 are inconsistent with it, so much the worse for them. The question 
 
 if- 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 13 
 
 is no longer, "Is development a fact?", but rather "How are we to under- 
 stand the fact of development?" Obviously the same thing cannot be 
 true in science and false in philosophy; a science of change cannot associate 
 on equal terms with a philosophy of fixity and temporal changelessness. 
 If such contradiction exist, it is probably on the side of philosophy 
 that rearrangement will have to be made. And it is further evident 
 that if there is to be any readjustment of first principles, this will con- 
 cern very vitally the ancient problem of change and time. Any altera- 
 tion in the status of one of these involves a corresponding alteration in 
 the status of the other, since the two conceptions are bound to be inter- 
 dependent. 
 
 First, then, a word or so about change and its relation to the present 
 problem. The time has passed, even in the realm of philosophy, when 
 a solution could be accepted that amounted to a denial of the facts. 
 It does not seem to have disturbed the Eleatics that their solution of the 
 problem of change and identity flatly contradicted the very facts on 
 which the problem itself was based. It only convinced them that 
 there was something wrong with the world, not with their argument. 
 The Christian Science method of disposing of the problem of evil is 
 about the only overt modern parallel to this sort of logic. The former 
 concluded that change is an illusion just as the latter insists that pain 
 and evil are lies. The logic is essentially the same. 
 
 But while the ordinary scientist would laugh at this naivete, still there 
 is a sense in which scientific theory is always on the verge of a kind of 
 Eleaticism. Ever since the time of Empedocles there have been periodic 
 attempts to relegate change to "relations" and to hold that the ultimately 
 real things, — atoms, corpuscles, electrons, ether — are changeless and 
 eternal. Each ultimate particle, according to these scientists who have 
 mistaken a working hypothesis for a metaphysical theory, turns out to 
 be the ancient Eleatic "Being" in miniature, — the main difference 
 being that they have multiplied this abstract ghost of reality by an 
 inconceivable number instead of contenting themselves with one as 
 Parmenides did.^* The utter hopelessness of such an alternative is 
 evident when we consider (a) that there cannot be change between 
 things that is not somehow accounted for by change in things, and 
 (b) that the relations themselves must be regarded as real — at least 
 as real as the change which they embody, and, if we press the matter a 
 little, they even threaten, as over against a horde of indiscernible "cores" 
 
 " Cf. Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science. 
 
14 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 of changeless being, to usurp all the reality in sight.^^ This is logically, 
 if not historically, the end of the matter. Strictly modern science has 
 come pretty generally to realize that its proper field is a dynamic one; 
 the reality with which it deals is a reaUty of action and interaction; 
 its laws are laws of change. It would be more or less absurd to make 
 evolution its central conception, and at the same time insist that change 
 itself was only a surface phenomenon which did not penetrate into the 
 reality of things. Modern science, at any rate, has no further use for 
 the changeless core of being that some of our ancestors had such respect 
 for. Things change through and through if they change at all ; the change 
 in things is just as real as the things themselves. 
 
 Nor has philosophy any particular prerogative by which it may 
 hold to a changeless substrate through change while that alternative is 
 denied to science. As a modern writer has said, it has been the custom 
 of philosophers in the past "to pronounce holy ban upon change"; 
 it is stamped as appearance, although it be appearance in which nothing 
 appears; it is regarded as phenomenal and contrasted with changeless 
 noumena, altogether to the advantage of the latter. But the remarks 
 made above apply with equal force here. The appearances of things 
 do not change unless the things themselves change also, and philosophy 
 can have no more use for changeless noumena than science for change- 
 less atoms. 
 
 Of course, philosophy would face the problem of change and time 
 whether evolution were a fact or not. Indeed evolution, so far as it is an 
 empirical law, only presents the old problem of time and change in a 
 shghtly altered and greatly exaggerated form. The staggering vastness 
 of time and space as they are understood by the modern geologist and 
 astronomer would indeed cause Plato or Aristotle to hold his breath; 
 but all this appears to affect the situation for philosophy chiefly (a) in 
 giving it immensely more time and change to think about, and (b) in 
 making the call for a solution much more urgent. For science it is a 
 matter of great importance which details in a certain series come first, 
 and the exact relation in which each stands to all the rest. But phi- 
 losophy can deal with the problem only in a general way. Its problem 
 is not what particular changes take place, nor how many there are of them, 
 but rather how change in general is to be understood; it is not the details 
 of the process, but the ultimate meaning and reality of process that it 
 seeks to determine. If a person understands the process of arithmetical 
 
 i« Cf. Borden P. Bowne, Metaphysics, Ch. ii and iii. 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEMS 15 
 
 division, it is a matter of logical indifference whether the dividend con- 
 tains six digits or six million of them. The rule that completely explains 
 the one operation just as completely explains the other. And precisely 
 the same is true of the philosophical rationale of this problem of change. 
 If the reality of a present changing thing can be satisfactorily construed 
 in logical terms, it is a matter of small rational import whether the 
 series of changes be exhausted in the present hour or sweep across an 
 infinity of time. And so the problem faces anyone who has an ambition 
 to form a consistent view of the world, not "Is change real?" but "^\Tiat 
 sort of reality does it have?" — "How am I to organize the idea of change 
 into my general view?'' 
 
 The fact that change is accepted as real does not solve this problem. 
 To say that it is real is not the same as to say that it is absolute, although, 
 of course, it is consistent with such a view. The Universe, as Professor 
 James said, may be "more than one story deep"; that question is not 
 preemted by settling the scientific problem. An illustration, perhaps, 
 may help us here. Suppose we imagine ourselves back in the midst of 
 the reahst-nominalist debate that once shook philosophical Europe so 
 profoundly, and let us raise the question whether there are really uni- 
 versal ideas. Bishop Berkeley takes the position that we really have no 
 general idea of triangle, — only a word and an image of some particular 
 triangle to which the word, for the time being, attaches itself. Now 
 there are a great variety of positions that a person might take in opposi- 
 tion to this radical nominalism. For instance, (1) he might hold simply 
 that, in consciousness, there does exist the general meaning "triangu- 
 larity" which is not the same as a specific image, even though it might 
 always be accompanied by one. It is strictly a sense of general truth, 
 a consciousness of the characterizing mark of all triangles. Or (2) one 
 might hold that the general idea " triangle" exists as a sort of substance, — 
 that it has a reality independent both of its embodiment in particular 
 triangles, and of the thinking process by which one thinks the idea, 
 i. e., some such a view as was held by John Scotus Erigena. Or (3) one 
 might conceivably hold that the consciousness to which the idea is 
 present, is itself triangular. Or, to carry our illustration to its extreme 
 limits, one might hold (4) that the universe is triangular, or (5) that 
 it is primarily a triangle! Of course, it needs no argument to show 
 the wild absurdity of these last hypotheses; but granted that nobody 
 holds such views, we may at least consider them as verbal possibilities, 
 which is sufficient for our present purpose. We intend only to insist 
 
16 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 that "triangle" might be real in one sense without being so in the others. 
 That it should exist as an idea in thought is not the same as that the 
 universe should be triangular nor even that consciousness should be 
 triangular. And it is also evident that, while the first alternative makes 
 it real, it does not make it so real as do the latter ones. In a sense 
 every detail of the universe, — a dream, a shadow, a forgotten meaning — 
 must somehow characterize it. The reality of the abstract idea of triangle 
 at least proves that the universe is such that its character is sufficient 
 to account for that particular fact. However, it is an altogether differ- 
 ent matter, and it makes triangularity infinitely more real, too, to say 
 that the universe is triangular! 
 
 Now the same thing may be true of change. To deny that change 
 is an illusion is at least not necessarily synonymous with the affirmation 
 that the universe as such is a process of change. This question, however, 
 is not for immediate discussion. It concerns us only indirectly as a 
 correlate of the time puzzle and so must, for the most part, be treated 
 only by inference. But, while it is not our purpose to discuss the ques- 
 tion in any thorough-going way, it may lead to more comfortable orien- 
 tation, if we remind ourselves at this juncture of some cardinal reasons 
 for thinking that change as we see it is not an accidental break in the 
 calm of a measureless monotony, but is a very real and important aspect 
 of being. 
 
 (1) When philosophers set out to define what is meant by a thing's 
 being real, about the only predicate that seems available for the purpose 
 is that of activity. If there is to be any mark to distinguish an existent 
 thing from pure nothing, that mark seems to be energy, activity. A 
 thing which never made itself felt in the world, — which never made a 
 difference in the aspect and behavior of the world process, would be, 
 so far as that process is concerned, non-existent. In other words, a 
 thing is not actual unless it acts in some real way; and activity means 
 change. 
 
 (2) In the next place, the knowledge function is itself a process. 
 The self "appears" to be in a process of change, and that, by an argu- 
 ment analogous to Descartes' proof of its reality, is exactly the same 
 as to say that it knows itself to change. This simply means that in 
 the self change is as real as knowledge, and it is obviously absurd for 
 knowledge to pretend to get back of itself. Of course, change is not 
 the only aspect of the knowing process. It involves some sort of identity 
 as well as some sort of change, — an identity which, in its relation with 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEMS 17 
 
 change, makes possible the experience of continuity. In the first place, 
 the mere fact of change in consciousness implies an identity of some 
 kind in the existence of consciousness (since it could not change unless 
 something changed); and in the second place, the consciousness of 
 change implies at least relatively identical ideas in terms of which the 
 change is known. And this "relatively" is meant in a perfectly literal 
 sense; the ideas in terms of which we know change are just as "identical" 
 as our experience of change is real, since it is only as opposed to the 
 constancy of their meanings that we can become aware of change at all. 
 But it is evident that the element of identity, both in the knowing 
 subject and in its ideas, instead of contradicting change, is of a kind 
 implied by the very fact of change itself. 
 
 (3) The object as well as the subject "appears" to change. Now 
 it was said above that to say that the self "appears to itself to change" 
 is precisely the same as to say that it knows itself to change. Can the 
 same thing be said of this second proposition? Professor Ladd, for 
 instance, holds that it cannot. Although "cognitive consciousness of 
 change is convertible with cognition of actual change when the self is re- 
 garded as object, "^^ yet he insists, on the other hand, that while "things 
 do certainly appear to me, and to all men, very frequently and somewhat 
 indeiinitely to change, I cannot immediately convert this claim into an 
 indubitable proposition that things do, in reality, change."'^ This 
 distinction the writer finds it difficult to follow. We are told that con- 
 ceivably the apparent changes in the object might be due to "changes 
 in the mental point of view" rather than to real changes in the object 
 as it is in itself. But this assumes that it would be possible for the 
 object to change some of its relations (at least its relation to my con- 
 sciousness) without such change in relation resulting in, or involving, 
 any change in the being of the object. But do relations exist and change 
 independently of things? To the writer it seems quite incontestable 
 that if one means literally relations of the things, any change in relations 
 must stand for, and mean, change in the things themselves. 
 
 As opposed to this, however, we must take account of the claim of 
 the neo-realists that some relations, at least, are "external" and so 
 may change independently of things, — for instance spatial relations. 
 Perhaps nobody at the present day would be seriously inclined to explain 
 all change as a change of relations merely, of things in themselves 
 
 " Ladd, A Theory of Reality, p 145. 
 '« Ibid., p. 145. 
 
18 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 changeless. This is the Uteral impUcation of much present-day scien- 
 tific hypothesis but, as a rule, this convenient sort of mental picturing is 
 not presented as a serious metaphysic. But, now and then, there does 
 come this claim that relations can change without corresponding changes 
 in the related things themselves, and this, oddly enough, not from 
 "Absolutists" who are presumably interested in disclosing static reali- 
 ties, but from those who, in general, are determined to make change 
 absolutely real! Professor James, for instance, in a well-known passage 
 makes fun of the idea that "the-moon-as-looked-at-by-A" should be 
 really different from "the-moon-as-looked-at-by-B."^^ And as so 
 stated it cannot fail to be a good argumentum ad populum. The man 
 of the street would hardly be inclined to imagine that his movements 
 alter the equilibrium of the universe! But when the claim is definitely 
 set up in philosophical discussion that relations of things can change 
 without things changing, many questions and misgivings arise. (1) 
 How much change of relationship, for instance, is compatible with 
 changelessness in things? Is the being of the moon also independent 
 of the presence of the earth, which is only a finite multiple of myself so 
 far as spatial property is concerned? Surely not if we remember that 
 its nearness to the earth's mass has, in all probability, put an end to the 
 rotation of the moon on its axis, which, in turn, helps so much to explain 
 the characteristic features of our stellar neighbor. The moon simply 
 would not be what it is if the earth were absent, and in that case, then, 
 the relation of the moon to the earth is not an "external" one. And 
 now if it be replied that the presence of the above-mentioned A or B 
 does not obviously affect the moon at all, and that therefore they can 
 change their relation to the moon without the being of the moon under- 
 going any change, we must simply regard it as tantamount to the denial 
 of the validity of all inference that goes beyond what is present to the 
 senses. 
 
 And (2) one may very properly inquire if, in the passage quoted. 
 Professor James really means by the word "relationship" what the 
 word generally means. Let us suppose that x stands in a given relation 
 m to y, but that it makes absolutely no difference to y. In what con- 
 ceivable way would it differ from a relation m between x and z, granted 
 that it, too, expressed no inner character of z. Or, to put it another way, 
 we cannot say that two terms and the relation of these two to each other, 
 is just the same as three terms, especially when the very definition of 
 
 " James, Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 89. 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 19 
 
 relationship must consist in distinguishing it from terms. There is 
 something unearthly about a relation that is thus hypostasized as an 
 independently changing existence or entity. And even on general 
 principles one may justly hesitate to recognize a change in any part 
 of a related system that claims to produce no change at all in the other 
 parts. To the writer it inheres in the very notion of related parts that 
 all changes should, in the last analysis, be reciprocal: in so far as there is 
 system, all the parts would be affected by a change in any one part, and 
 even apart from this notion of system all the terms actually involved 
 in the relation should be affected by it just so far as the relation as such 
 is real. 
 
 But however that may be, we are certainly ready to admit with 
 an above-criticized author that "Agnosticism, whether positive or 
 negative, concerning the transsubjective validity of the category of 
 change undermines the entire fabric of human knowledge."^" It is, I 
 suppose, conceivable that all reasoning is untrustworthy; but as a mat- 
 ter of practical life it is utterly impossible to hold a view of which the 
 only consistent expression is absolute silence (although it would, of 
 course, be inconsistent for an absolute agnostic to recognize the claims 
 of consistency !) . And as soon as one departs from the hopeless tautology 
 of wholesale doubt, it becomes evident that a knowledge process can 
 stand in no intelligible relations with a static reality. Knowledge 
 is not a mere "having" of states; it is not a succession of sensations 
 and their copies, — of "impressions vivid or faint," as Hume would have 
 it; it is not a series of externally caused mechanical alterations that 
 consciousness suffers or undergoes. It is a kind of activity, an actual 
 fact (literally "f actus" — something done), not the mere bump of an 
 outer stimulus on a tabula rasa. This is about the only modernly 
 accepted view of the nature of the knowledge process, and one which for 
 present purposes may safely be assumed. Now it is plain that if the 
 real world is a series of things of which the only determining essence is 
 immutability, then the process of knowledge is, by its very nature, at utter 
 parallax with that world. In other words, a knowledge which is, as 
 such, dynamic cannot possibly be a knowledge of a static world. We 
 conclude, therefore, that the validity of knowledge implies a change 
 that is just as real as the concrete objects of consciousness themselves. 
 
 The purpose of the foregoing was to show that change as an objective 
 and subjective fact belongs to the very essence of the cosmic order, 
 
 " Ladd, A Theory of Reality, p. 148 
 
20 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 the order with which science deals. That does not mean that it is the only 
 aspect of said order that is real, nor that it is real in any sense in which some 
 other aspects (as for instance, space) are not real. It cannot be illusion, 
 even if it may possibly not be the final word about reality. The world of 
 changeless "cores" either of the ancient or modern Eleatics is a fiction 
 of the imagination. So much we may safely take for granted. Change 
 in the objects of our world is as real as the objects themselves. Of 
 course, on the other hand, a predicate true for the parts is not on that 
 account true for the whole. On the contrary, it is often true that what 
 holds good for the terms of a series is, for that very reason, not appHcable 
 to the series as such. But then something is gained if we have shown that 
 change, in the world of things, is a stubborn fact that cannot be put aside 
 as mere seeming, or shelved as belonging only to relationships. Logically 
 temporal change is strictly coordinate with temporal fixity or change- 
 lessness, not subordinate to it; and on the side of concrete facts it seems 
 overwhelmingly to predominate over this logical antithesis. For phil- 
 osophy, then, it remains, and must remain, a fact of first importance. 
 
 The apology for this long introduction may by this time be apparent. 
 Change and time, we might almost say, are converse sides of the same 
 problem. Each in some sense implies the other, and each looks ultimate 
 when viewed from the standpoint of the other. Change implies time, 
 though not in a way that is easy to state. Change is not mere difference; 
 nor is it mere difference in succession. The simple fact that a certain 
 proposition is true at the present moment, and a certain other true at a 
 future moment, is not sufi&cient to determine a fact of change. It is 
 not necessarily change unless the two mutually exclusive judgments 
 concern the same object at different times. This, of course, does not 
 mean that a part of the object remains changeless. Indeed, if it did, 
 we should have to say that our predications simply did not refer at all 
 to that part of the object, — in other words, that it was really not a part 
 of the subject of our judgments at all. We mean simply that the thing 
 that changes must have sufficient identity in the two successive moments 
 to embody the two successive meanings in its one existence; otherwise, 
 ^ we have difference but not change. Or, as we have said before, there must 
 ^ be something thought of as changing. But even apart from the question 
 regarding their subjects, it is at least evident that the two judgments, 
 or facts, would have to be successive in order for change to mean any- 
 thing whatever, and the essential point we care to notice here is that the 
 possibiUty of change is thus logically bound up with the equivalent 
 reahty of time. 
 
ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEMS 21 
 
 And now, on the other hand, if we look at the matter from the stand- 
 point of the concept of time, there are equally cogent reasons for regarding 
 change as a presupposition of the reality of time. A static or changeless 
 time Is a contradiction in terms. The time relations of past, present, and 
 future are by their very nature in a process of continual change. The 
 present is no longer the present, if in it the relations of past and future 
 congeal, the future would not be real future unless its distance from 
 the present were constantly decreasing. The present is primarily the 
 place of change of future into past, and without this qualification it 
 loses completely its time character. Indeed this meaning of change 
 which seems at first so remote and abstract, is so real on closer inspection 
 that some have regarded it as the only real form of change. Mr. McTag- 
 gert,2i for example, insists that it is the only form that is to be taken as a 
 serious problem, which conception (even if Mr. McTaggert does later 
 decide that it is all illusion!) makes this change of time relations more 
 fundamental than that of qualities or dynamic relations, where people 
 ordinarily locate the essence of change. But we do not need to adopt 
 this extreme view in order to insist that time implies the possibility, 
 nay, the actuahty, of some change. This is the exact converse of the 
 conclusion of the preceding paragraph, and, if both be true, then it is 
 shown that time and change are so intimately related that they pre- 
 suppose each other; and we may fairly conclude that the two facts in 
 their ultimate being are correlative. 
 
 But not identical! One of the most fruitless ways of dealing with 
 either of these is to try to reduce it completely to terms of the other. 
 Consider, by way of illustration, the following selections from an article 
 by V. Welby on Time as Derivative}'^ "There is no such thing as an 
 ultimate problem of Time, nor even indeed of Space; the only ultimate 
 problem for us in this connection is that of change."^^ And again, "I 
 conceive that the idea of time has arisen because, becoming aware of, 
 or realizing, experience in its aspect as a sequence of change, we need 
 to measure it. Borrowing a space idea for the purpose, we measure it 
 as a line; we see it in perspective. The 'measure' of experience thus 
 gained we call time."^^ And once more, "Change, then, as occurring 
 in space, with its conditional or concomitant motion, seems to be the 
 central or original experience Thus through Motion and 
 
 " McTaggert, Unreality oj Time, Mind, 1908. 
 « V. Welby, Time as Derivative, Mind, 1907. 
 " Ibid., p. 398. 
 " p. 393. 
 
22 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 as the functions of memory and expectation develop, we ultimately 
 translate Change into Time,"^^ etc. Perhaps these statements are not 
 very vividly illuminating, but whatever plausibiUty they may have will 
 Serve to illustrate the point we have above aimed at, — that change 
 and time imply each other. It is, in a sense, true to say that change 
 plus m.emory and expectation produce the idea of time, because if we had 
 the sense of change and the function of memory, etc., we would indeed 
 soon have, as a result, the idea of time. But the haunting misgivings 
 the ordinary reader has after following such a deduction are due to the 
 fact that it would work quite as well in the opposite direction. If we 
 had, for instance, a sense of duration or succession plus memory and 
 expectation in their overt form, we would also have the idea of change. 
 Of course, time without some change is impossible, but so is change 
 without a before-and-after, — i. e., without time. It would doubtless be 
 possible to prove in a most elaborate way that convexity is only a phase 
 of concavity, — and that therefore "the only ultimate problem for us 
 
 in this connection is that of" concavity! A wonderful 
 
 deliverance, to be sure, but possessed of the one serious fault that it 
 does not get anywhere. 
 
 In a tone similar to the above mentioned article. Professor Liebmann 
 insists that time is only ultimately change. He relates,-^ in a charming 
 way, the ancient legend of the time when the whole world stood stock 
 still until the prince should come to waken the sleeping princess, and adds 
 that could such an absolute cessation of all motion actually occur there 
 would be no such thing as time in the interval, — except, of course, for 
 some onlooker whose vital processes were still going on, — perhaps in 
 this case for the prince! But the very statement itself is hopelessly 
 circular. What would an interval be in which there was no time? 
 Possibly something like an opening in which there was no space! Of 
 course, there would be no time if there were not at least the change of 
 future into past, etc.; but then, neither would there be any interval. I 
 doubt if the illustration itself, or the point that it is meant to illustrate, 
 could possibly be stated in a way that would in the least conceal the 
 circle that inheres in it. At any rate, the writers we have here taken as 
 examples certainly fail to do so. 
 
 For our present purposes, then, we shall assume without further 
 discussion that charige and time are, in the degree of their reality, strictly 
 correlative. This does not mean that the more change goes on the more 
 
 25 p. 396. 
 
 '^ Zur Analysis der Wirklichkdt , pp. 108-109. 
 
THE RELAXniTV Or TIME ^3 
 
 time passes by, but that to just the extent to whici, we adm.t the reahty 
 rchrnge we are bound to admit the reahty of time, and v.ce versa. 
 This necessity we shall try to abide by in the discussion that follows. 
 THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 
 Anyone who reads this is familiar with the old paradox co"cerning 
 the dubious existence of time. The past and the future by defmit^n 
 do not exist; only the present is real. But the present "- -^^efoTe 
 no duration, and so it, taken alone, is not properly time at all, therefore 
 ttae does not exist. And I suppose that one might just as well add 
 :Z ste, by definition, the present is only a part of ttme^, ,t too ts non- 
 existent if time as such does not exist. Thus we seem as Be ke ey 
 once remarked, "lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties. 
 °p"r esrrullerton^^ has called our attention to the fact tha something 
 over a thousand years ago St. Augustine was disturbed on this same 
 p^Lt. "Those two times, past and future, how can they be^when tte , 
 past is not now, and the future is not yet? . . ^ ■ ' J2J2 
 I the time we may call long? Is it future We do ™' ^^yj *; 
 future 'It is long'; for as yet there exists nothing to be long. \\e say, 
 'it w U be ong.' But when?" Surely not when it is present etc., etc 
 Hs sit on -that "long," "short," etc., when applied to time, mus 
 te interpreted in terms of memory and anticipation only evades the point 
 b^ transe ring the whole discussion and its interest to another field. 
 The question is by no means obsolete, and perhaps we must count our- 
 selves lucky if we can dispose of the matter as well as he did. 
 
 If we a'e to give common language any consideration at all we shal 
 find some of its expressions about as near a real theory of transcendenc 
 as some other of its expressions are far away from such a theory. While it 
 m: scandali.ed'at the suggesUon that any P-'.— --' ^ 
 real it would be equally offended if one should say. There is no sucl^ 
 W as the past or future!" On the one hand the past is not real; tha 
 s a matter of course. But on the other hand, there is certainly a real 
 past It does not do to try to force common sense to be content with 
 saving that the past did exist, because then it was present, not past at 
 I^nI there I a past,-at least I do not mean she- "othmg"^- 
 when I speak of it. It is no wonder that common sense so f quentl> 
 outraged by the "philosophers" because, m the chaotic hit-or-m.ss 
 ac umulation of common sense judgments that the race has acquired, 
 
 " Principles of Human Knowledge, Par. 98. 
 M Introduction to Phil., p. 90. 
 
24 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 there is great enough variety to make sure that no matter what con- 
 clusion thought might come to, it is bound to contradict a whole lot 
 of them. Common sense, in its deliverances on such questions as the 
 above, is just about as idealistic as it is anything else, — but then, of 
 course, it is not consistently anything. 
 
 Augustine, as we saw, seeks refuge in the thought that long and 
 short time, etc., as we know it, is relative to our memories, expectations, 
 and purposes. This was, no doubt, to a certain extent, an evasion of the 
 problem he had started out with. But, on the other hand, a theory of 
 time must be consistent with all the facts, and psychological facts are 
 as much facts as any others are. What he made out was, essentially, 
 that time as we know it in our living experience is relative to our present 
 situation, to the memories we treasure and the plans and hopes we have 
 at heart. "As we know it in our experience — ," but I do not see that 
 we have anything else to go on than just that, — any other way of know- 
 ing it, or any outside experience to build our theory on. So, it may not 
 be amiss to review hastily some of the respects in which our time is 
 relative. 
 
 That at least our estimates of time are relative scarcely needs pointing 
 out. If a great need oppresses us and time is required for its satisfaction, 
 it makes little difference how much cosmic change goes on during the 
 interval, that interval is long for us in every sense of the word. For 
 the young the days are short but the years are long; for the old the years 
 are short but the days are long. The hour of monotony is longest in 
 passing but shortest as remembered; the hour of pleasure is shortest in 
 passing but longest in memory, etc. And this relativity is true even on 
 a much greater scale. If a gnat's wing executes fifty consciously directed 
 movements in the shortest duration that is discernable to us, then, as 
 Mr. Spencer^* has pointed out, its notion of a day must be vastly dif- 
 ferent from ours. And so far as that is concerned there is no a priori 
 reason why there should not be beings, as Professor Royce'*^ suggests, 
 with so different a time-sense that they would live whole geological 
 periods in the time that for us would be practically negligible. And 
 similarly, there might easily exist beings who would regard the eternities 
 of our astronomical cycles as too brief for serious consideration.^^ 
 
 " Psychology, Sec. 91, quoted by James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. i, p. 639. 
 '" World and Individual, Vol. ii, p. 130 ff. 
 
 '' Cf. also Coudillac, Treatise on Sensation, Ch. iv, and K. E. von Bar, Welche 
 A uffassung der lehenden Natiir ist die richtige? 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 25- 
 
 Considering the question from a slightly different standpoint, we 
 may inquire whether there are not types of experience common to us in 
 which there is no time consciousness. In his Principles of Pragmatism^^ 
 Dr. Bawden suggests that there are states in which the ordinary dis- 
 tinctions of means and ends, hope and memory, past and future, are 
 forgotten, and when, from the standpoint of conscious time relations, 
 the state of mind is practically absolute. He offers, as an example, the 
 state of mind of a man who has just realized his ambition to complete 
 a savings account of one thousand dollars in the bank. The unalloyed 
 joy of success is oblivious of age and change. But while we have no 
 disposition to doubt the existence of states of consciousness which, 
 seen from the inside, are untemporal (on the contrary we are quite 
 convinced that such a condition is frequently realized in cases of artistic 
 absorption and contemplative abstraction), it seems to us nevertheless 
 that the illustration chosen by Dr. Bawden is unfortunate. One would 
 think that the state of mind of the man he describes would be preemi- 
 nently one of "Now at last, after all this effort," etc., rather than a time- 
 forgetting ecstatic inundation! But however that may be, there are 
 instances enough in which the ordinary considerations of before and 
 after, means and end, etc., are absent and to which Dr. Bawden's remarks 
 would well apply. It is interesting, by the way, that even he, a prag- 
 matist, uses with reference to them that mystical phrase "collapse into 
 immediacy"^* which, I believe, comes from Hegel, the absolutist of 
 absolutists! 
 
 But while the point he makes is in all probability a valid one, it does 
 not seem to me to be of the greatest importance so far as the general 
 theory of time relations is concerned. It is from the consciousness 
 of time, not the unconsciousness of it, that we must get the data for our 
 final view. We shall therefore omit, for the present, any detailed dis- 
 cussion of this interesting phase of the problem. 
 
 The one great premise that our immediate experience gives us is 
 simply that we are literally conscious of duration. As Augustine insisted 
 with a quaint, dignified sort of petulence — "And yet. Lord, we do perceive 
 periods of time and compare them with one another !"^^ Not that we 
 feel pure time buzzing along by itself, but we nevertheless immediately 
 know succession with its implied dip into past and future. This we 
 
 '=p. 309ff. 
 
 3' p. 310. 
 
 *• Confessions, Book xi, Ch. 16. 
 
26 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 could never do were we limited to the data that one indivisible instant 
 of time would afford. To know that change is going on at all the 
 presence of some finite amount of the process to consciousness in one 
 whole is absolutely necessary. Professor FuUerton states the case 
 as follows, "No instantaneous photograph of consciousness, however 
 much memory, etc., it could show, would give any clue to the idea of 
 duration."^* And so "it is only necessary to take one's stand upon the 
 fact that we really are conscious of duration, and to keep clearly in 
 view what this implies. "^^ The span of consciousness must, that is, 
 include more than one instant, and this span marks out the limits of the 
 present for the consciousness referred to. Says Professor Ladd, in a 
 passage which he certainly forgets later in his discussion, "It is the 
 grasp of consciousness that gives to the 'now' of time experience all the 
 reality that it has."^^ In short, whatever one may choose to think about 
 the reaUty of what we shall call the "logical" present (that is, the mathe- 
 matical present, — the one without duration that merely divides past and 
 future) in the external world, that logical present is just as "external" 
 to concrete experience as is the hypothetical world of abstract law in 
 which the mathematician places it. Of course, if consciousness really 
 existed in any such an absolute present as that, it could never know the 
 present at all as a division of time. 
 
 But if, for us, the present seems to be relative to the scope or span 
 of consciousness, is it not at the same time relative to events that are 
 going on in the world at large? In one sense that seems to be the case. 
 The change of the cosmos is largely independent of us, including even 
 most of the periodical rhythms of our own life in terms of which our esti- 
 mates of time are balanced. But no appeal to the cosmic movement 
 _back of, and in, these changes will help to solve the present problem. 
 Let us admit that the time sense would be impossible without change, 
 and that most of that change is beyond our control, not excepting the 
 organic rhythms we spoke of, and then let us try to define the present 
 in terms of such change. I do not think it can be done. One may 
 say, for instance, that the present is the actual point of change; that our 
 conscious present, to be sure, seems to cover more time than that, but 
 that if we were only capable of discernment sharp enough we would see 
 that the remainder of that "present" was really past and future. But 
 
 '' System of Metaphysics, p. 205. 
 
 3« Ibid., p. 207. 
 
 " Theory of Reality, p. 188. 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 27 
 
 there are difl&culties here. In the first place, (a) one must at best 
 locate this real point of change in terms of the conscious present, if it 
 is to have any meaning at all. It turns out that the " real" present is that 
 point of the apparent present at which change is actually going on; 
 and this implicitly gives all the logical priority to the conscious present 
 as we actually know it. And further (b) it is perfectly meaningless 
 to say that it is the point of "real" change, since our knowledge of the 
 past is as really in terms of change as is our knowledge of the present. 
 The only meaning that the word "real" could possibly have in this con- 
 nection is as synonymous with "present," in which case, of course, the 
 definition is completely tautologous. And (c) as a simple matter of 
 fact the conscious present does not contain any such crucial point, or 
 ridge, or watershed at which "real" change goes on, ahead of which 
 all is ideal and indeterminate and back of which finished fact lies silentlv 
 in state. On the contrary we are directly conscious of a finite amount of 
 change going on over a perfectly real span of consciousness, and our sense 
 of control of part of this world of our conscious life is just as expansive 
 and inclusive from the temporal standpoint. That is, in our volitional 
 control of elements in experience, we do not simply have to strike instan- 
 taneously at an event as it slips over the hair-line of the transit; it is 
 subject to our direction, if at all, during the whole period that we call 
 the specious present. 
 
 Of course, this specious present has no perfectly definite boundaries. 
 Its scope is wider for some people than for others; for the same individual 
 it is more inclusive at some times than at others; and never is it distinctly 
 marked off from the past and the future. The concrete life of the 
 present with its sense basis gradually melts away in both directions into 
 complete ideality, — the ideality of memory on the one hand and that of 
 anticipation on the other. But, although no clear line may be drawn 
 between them, these types of fact are in the main as easily distinguishable 
 as day and night, which latter are never very seriously confused on 
 account of the gradations by which one dissolves into the other. 
 
 One thing that surely seems to relate our time consciousness to some 
 outer necessity of a cosmic sort is, as so many have pointed out, that the 
 series is irreversible. We may hope and plan for the future, but so far 
 as the past is concerned, "What's done, 's done!" In a sense remorse 
 is hope turned wrong side out; it is our volition beating its wings against 
 the barred gates of the past. In short, the "direction" in which we 
 must go is absolutely fixed in the nature of things, — a determination, 
 
28 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 of course, which needs explanation. Kant^^ held that the order of events 
 in time for us depends upon an abstract and necessary law of causality 
 by which we see one fact to be the antecedent and the other the con- 
 sequent by virtue of the necessary dependence of the latter on the 
 former. A heavy ball, let us say, is placed on a pillow and makes a 
 depression in it. If our knowledge of the properties of cushion and ball 
 is at all correct, it is at once evident that the depression must follow the 
 placing there of the ball; on the other hand, the depression in the pillow 
 might have been caused in an infinite variety of ways. Thus, while it 
 is possible to deduce the effect from the cause, it is not possible to deter- 
 mine the nature of the cause from that of the effect. In this fact, then, we 
 have a basis for the definite direction, or order, of our time series. 
 
 This conception Professor Rogers^^ criticizes as resting upon a loose 
 and gratuitous conception of cause and effect. As Mill has shown, 
 the real and complete cause of any event is the whole universal state of 
 things immediately preceding it, and the complete effect is the state of 
 the whole universe in the instant following the cause. And if the rela- 
 tionship be understood in this more exact manner the connection, if 
 necessary in one direction, is equally necessary in the reverse direction. 
 Or, to go back to the illustration cited by Kant, the depression in the 
 pillow is compatible with more than one cause only if we consider this 
 one fact, the depression, out of all connection with the rest of the universe. 
 But this abstraction is unwarranted. This fact in reality exists only in 
 connection with the others; and if we knew all these others it would 
 appear that nothing else than just that lead ball could possibly have 
 been in just that place at just that moment, and it becomes just as easy 
 to see the cause in an effect as the effect in a cause. In other words, 
 the term "t" in the equation of the universe may be given either a 
 positive or negative value with equal mathematical propriety. We 
 make it positive when we wish to figure forward and negative to figure 
 backward. One is just as safe in calculating the eclipses of a thousand 
 years ago as in predicting those of a thousand years to come. Thus 
 there is no rational necessity in the laws of phenomena on which the 
 order of events in time may depend, and so the basis of the distinction 
 of past and future must be sought elsewhere than in the series considered 
 either (1) as phenomena of mutually exclusive moments, or (2) as related 
 terms of cause and effect. 
 
 '* Critique of Pure Reason, Second Analogy, pp. 155-172 (Miiller's Tr.). 
 '' R. A. P. Rogers, Meaning of the Time Direction, Mind, U. S. xiv. 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 
 
 29 
 
 In this connection, however, a dangerous suggestion is made, even 
 though it is formally guarded,— the suggestion that if the direction of 
 every particle in the universe were suddenly reversed while yet it kept 
 exactly the same velocity, phenomena might run back over their past 
 history in reverse order to that in which they have actually occurred. 
 Professor Ward^« also discusses this question and, I believe, comes to a 
 similar conclusion,— that is, in so far as phenomena are considered as a 
 necessary sequence of cause and effect. And so long as one's attention 
 is limited to such purely mechanical and molar series as lunar eclipses 
 the suggestion seems an altogether probable one. But one gets into 
 trouble if one tries to apply it very widely. The steam confined in the 
 cyhnder of an engine, let us say, is expanding when the shock of this 
 universal reversal of all motion comes. Suddenly the direction of every 
 bounding molecule of the gas is exactly reversed. Will the bombardment 
 of the walls of the cyhnder by these molecules be diminished? The 
 kinetic theory of gases will hardly permit us to say that the pressure 
 on the piston would in such a case be changed to a kind of suction, and 
 so its motion consistently reversed! Or, to take a still more obvious 
 case, it is probably evident that a change in the direction of movement 
 would hardly start the organic processess in a grown man back toward 
 babyhood ! 
 
 We do not, however, conclude from this that the law of necessary 
 causation is not reversible. On the contrary, we agree heartily with 
 Professor Rogers's contention that, considered as an objective series only, 
 the events of a closed causal series have no mathematical preference for 
 one direction over another. But the above illustration is unfortunate 
 simply in that it does not cover all the facts. It conceives of motion, 
 only, as being reversed; and that would be an adequate example for the 
 point in question only if one were prepared to hold that all relations of 
 cause and effect are reducible, not merely to motion, but to direction of 
 motion, simply. No one who has heard of chemical relationships, for 
 instance, would care to try to reduce them simply to types of motion, 
 the only determinants of which were velocity and direction. The above 
 illustration, therefore, we seem bound to regard as a misleading one. 
 
 " Jas. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. i, p. 203. In thi^ di^cu.sion he at 
 least quotes Helmholtz {WissenshaJlUche Abhandlungen, Bd. in, p. 594) wi h implied 
 agreement with the latter's position. And Helmholt. holds that a complete reversal 
 of all atomic movements in the universe would start the whole process of evolution 
 backward. 
 
30 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 The reason for discussing that illustration so much at length is simply 
 that it is so often met with in the literature of the subject. As indicated 
 above, we are in perfect sympathy with the general conclusion to which 
 Professor Rogers comes, that, apart from the facts of consciousness, 
 the very distinction of future from past (in that sense, the "direction" 
 of the time order) is rendered logically impossible. It may be a little 
 extreme to say that "desire, then, is the subjective element which gives a 
 meaning to the distinction between past and present," but if we under- 
 stand desire to stand for all allied conscious functions such as regret, 
 hope, satisfaction, memory, anticipation, etc., — the concrete orientation 
 of experience in general, we must certainly accept the conclusion to 
 which this author comes. 
 
 But in spite of the fact that this brings us back so abruptly to con- 
 sciousness again as the source and ground of time distinctions, the claim 
 will not down that this given drift of the time series must link it to 
 some controlling outer necessity. It is sometimes pointed out that in 
 this one respect (irreversibility) time differs very conspicuously from the 
 other serial relationships in terms of which our experience is built, — 
 that, while it is possible to regard space as one of our ways of relating 
 things, time must, in view of this difference, be regarded as rooting 
 deeper in reality. But as the statement is ordinarily put, does it really 
 compare the spatial and temporal series on an equal footing? Suppose 
 we say that the spatial series is reversible while the temporal series is not. 
 This means, let us suppose, that a real object may traverse a given 
 part of space a second time, while a given period of time can be experi- 
 enced but once. This, I think, would be the ordinary meaning. How- 
 ever, it must be evident on a moment's thought that in these two alter- 
 natives, spatial and temporal terms are thoroughly tangled. Suppose an 
 object does traverse exactly the same space a second time; can it be said 
 that we are dealing here only with the spatial series? What would a 
 second time have to do with a purely spatial series? On the contrary, 
 is not time here the central fact of the whole situation? In which case 
 we must state the supposed alternative as follows: A given series of 
 points in space can be experienced a second tifne, while a given series 
 of points in time cannot be experienced a second tbne. That is, a spatial- 
 temporal series is compared with a temporal-temporal series, and it is 
 no wonder that a difference in principle should be found to obtain 
 between the two. We set out to compare time with something else, 
 and then state the proposition in such a way that time becomes the 
 common denominator of both, — of itself and of the other series with 
 
THE KELATIMTV OF TIME 31 
 
 which it is being compared. No final comparison can be made on these 
 terms. 
 
 But perhaps there is another way to understand the whole con- 
 tention. Suppose we say that direction is the only thing referred to in 
 this case. When it is said that the space series is reversible while the 
 time series is not, we should then mean that an object can go in any 
 direction in space while time changes in only one direction, — from past 
 toward the future. But here again, it seems to me, we have failed to 
 oppose a spatial to a temporal series in a simple and coordinate manner. 
 Is direction of movement any more a spatial than a temporal phenomenon, 
 even when the movement is ordinary spatial movement and the direc- 
 tion, therefore, supposedly a spatial direction? Movement, like any 
 other change, is inherently a time function. Take any two points on 
 the path of a moving body, and the direction of movement means simply 
 which of the two points was occupied first (i. e., in time). It appears, 
 then, that instead of a simple space series, we have, on this side, a com- 
 plicated space-time function. And the other alternative would, on this 
 view of the problem, be little better off. What could one possibly mean 
 by "direction" in time anyhow? Of course, we will be told that the 
 expression is figurative merely; but is there any way to state the idea so 
 that it would not be figurative? A figure is not a fortunate one when it 
 usurps all the meaning to itself and completely conceals the analogy 
 it is meant to embody. At any rate, it is evident that here again we are 
 not comparing a simple space series with a simple and coordinate time 
 series, and that is just what ought to be done if the distinction in question 
 is to be maintained. 
 
 And if, now, we get away from the purely spatial metaphor'*' usually 
 inherent in our notion of time (as when we spoke of "direction" in time 
 a few lines above) the situation simmers down to about this. Space and 
 time are names for certain serial quanta in experience. Since they are 
 quanta I can refer to them in terms of number and magnitude. I 
 can measure a hundred feet or miles or millimeters in space, or a hundred 
 hours, or seconds or centuries in time. To be sure I cannot wait five 
 hours into the past. But then, it would be about as easy to do that as 
 to walk a minus five miles in space! In neither case does a negative 
 quantity have other than a symbolic application. In other words, the 
 ordinary method of elevating time to a position of less relativity to us and 
 to our experience consists in stating it in terms wholly metaphorical, 
 
 ^' Cf. Bcrgson, Time and Free Will. 
 
32 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 taking the metaphor in a perfectly Hteral way, finding that as so taken it 
 breaks through in spots, and then finally announcing that therefore 
 time is possessed of some very remarkable and even mystical pecuHari- 
 ties! This does not prove much, and we are left about where we were a 
 paragraph or so back : Time as we know it is largely relative to the form 
 of our own consciousness even for its distinction into past, present, and 
 future; and all these terms would be utterly meaningless if abstracted 
 from their experience-basis in which they find their origin and only 
 support. 
 
 "Yes," it may be said, "time, as it indeed seems to us, is a function 
 of conscious experience; but we ordinarily distinguish between a duration 
 that 'seems' long, and one that really 'is' long. The week before vaca- 
 tion seems infinitel}^ longer in passing than does the vacation week 
 itself, but I know that as a matter of fact the two weeks are of the very 
 same length. My consciousness is a timepiece but a poor one after 
 all, and I have to be continually setting it right by reference to the 
 great clock of the cosmos which has circling planets and stars for its 
 wheels and hands. Each conscious being has a 'time' of his own, but 
 such time, nevertheless, is even consciously relative to the real outer Time. 
 I may swallow a few grains of the appropriate drugs and my time values 
 will be so altered that I may seem to live centuries during the course of 
 a few minutes. But I awake and find that the sun is not far from where 
 it was when I went to sleep ; the flowers on the table have not yet wilted ; 
 and I forthwith decide that my appalling longevity was only a dream." 
 
 Such, undoubtedly, is in a large measure true, but still I doubt that 
 the "cosmic clock" is our whole criterion. In the first place, whence 
 comes my conviction that the sun goes at a fairly constant speed and 
 that days are all of about a length? I surely do not know this in advance 
 of experience, nor have I esoteric information on the subject from a 
 higher source. As a matter of fact we have decided that the sun does 
 not always go around the circuit of its apparent path in the same time. 
 We go by mean solar time for the explicit reason that we consider solar 
 time altogether too erratic. But this only pushes the question one notch 
 further back: Whence my conviction that the stellar universe makes one 
 apparent revolution in exactly the same time in which it makes any 
 other? or that my chronometers and the "laws" that run them proceed 
 at a perfectly uniform speed? There are two conceivable reasons for 
 this conviction; or better, perhaps, one reason with two sides to it. 
 In the first place, such an assumption affords us a common standard of 
 reference in the complex life of society; and in the second place, we find 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 33 
 
 that an assumption of such uniformity in nature is about the only way 
 we can reduce our own thought life to any sort of system. In other words, 
 the "real" time, over against which we contrast the "seeming" time 
 values of our varying experience, is itself an assumption of which the 
 sole warrant is that it makes our experience seem right! 
 
 (b) One other consideration along that line. A certain day seems 
 short to me, but since the sun has gone across the heavens but once 
 during that period, I conclude that I am wrong. But suppose that it 
 seemed short to everybody; then suppose that the next day seemed 
 unspeakably long to everybody. The chances are that we should 
 decide that our "cosmic clock" had itself gone wrong! In other words, 
 we would be back to our only really ultimate criterion again. 
 
 If now. we should say that time as it exists for us is "relative," 
 the meanmg ought to be fairly plain. And if we should say that in some 
 sense conscious experience "transcends" time, the second statement 
 would mean nothing not included in the first. It is not a case of bringing 
 in the "psychological monster" that Mr. Bradley so savagely anathema- 
 tizes. It requires no reference to a noumenal finite monad or any other 
 deep and dark mystery of that kind. It is a matter of simple and direct 
 conscious fact that time relations exist and come to their focus within 
 the activity of intelligence, and it is here insisted that this is not so much 
 an hypothesis to explain consciousness, as it is a description of the 
 conscious facts themselves. And finally, if it should be said that in 
 its existence consciousness, to just the degree to which it is able to 
 bind successive moments together in one experience, is itself "timeless" 
 (and this, I suppose, is about the most infuriating word in the whole 
 philosophical vocabulary to those who do not hold a view of this t)^e), 
 that word, too, need refer to nothing any more mysterious than do the 
 other expressions just used. To say that, even in our limited experience, 
 the time distinction, or the time relation, occurs as a conscious product 
 just so far as it is real to us, is just the same as to say that to this extent 
 the subject of the temporal experience is timeless in its existence and 
 ground. 
 
 And it may be well to point out here again that however real are the 
 states of mind in which the time aspects are lost, — the states of artistic 
 appreciation, contemplation, etc., that were mentioned above — these 
 are the exceptions that really prove the rule (i. e.,"test" it, — not dem- 
 onstrate or disprove it, as the expression is so often used to mean), — 
 they do not constitute the facts on which it is primarily based. As was 
 said before, it is the consciousness of time, not the unconsciousness of it, 
 
34 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 in which time is most obviously transcended. It is not when one is 
 lost to the world in day-dream, but rather when his grasp on the passage 
 of events, with all its concrete duration, and all its richness of movement 
 and change, is firmest, — when, indeed, his reflective consciousness of 
 transcendence is least; it is then that the real time-transcendence of 
 consciousness is most assured. 
 
 This point we can, perhaps, enforce by a brief reference to Professor 
 Lovejoy's article The Place of the Time Problem in Modern Philosophy }- 
 In this it is insisted that "idealistic eternahsm" rests on a "deep-reach- 
 ing confusion of conceptual time with the real time of our inner life, — 
 of thinking about a transition with the transition itself." This view we 
 do not need to discuss in detail here for two reasons. In the first place, 
 it is very closely allied to Professor Bergson's conception of time to which 
 latter a subsequent section of the present paper is devoted. And, 
 in the second place, we must resist the temptation to elaborate the point 
 that Professor Lovejoy's theory, like any other theory, is a "way of 
 thinking about" change. It is always easy to accuse the opponent 
 of using "mere ideas," but the accusation always involves the enter- 
 taining circle we have just referred to, and which numbers have pointed 
 out before. The present purpose is merely to ask if it is true that eter- 
 nalism is necessarily a reflection of conceptual time. • 
 
 In the first place, no one, surely, would regard the specious or psy- 
 chological present as an abstract or conceptual affair. It is the very 
 reverse. The older view according to which the present is a point of 
 zero duration might fairly be regarded as conceptual since the present 
 according to that view is a mathematical vanishing point, indiscernable 
 in concrete consciousness. But this is the very view that leads to the 
 hopeless difficulties that Augustine met with in his speculations. If 
 we think of the actual present as being the durationless one which does 
 not appear in conscious experience at all, that surely is not a really 
 ideahstic view of time, which by very definition would mean the locating 
 of it in the psychic world. If there be any view that should be defined 
 as "conceptual" as opposed to concrete, that is the highly abstract 
 conception of Newton above referred to. Time that "flows" at an 
 absolutely conscious rate, that boasts a present that can only be reached 
 over the hard road of mathematics and which therefore is forever shut 
 out from immediate experience,^-such a view is indeed conceptual to 
 an almost desperate pitch. But it is also thoroughly realistic, not idealis- 
 
 " Journal of Phil., Psy., and Scienlific Methods, vii, p. 23. 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 35 
 
 tic at all! If ''idealistic" means that the real world is ultimately a 
 a spiritual one and rests on the life of conscious experience, then we 
 must insist that conceptual time of the sort Professor Lovejoy alludes 
 to, points in precisely the opposite direction. 
 
 And on the other hand, the specious present on which we have 
 sought to base the view here set forth is a fortiori not an abstract affair. 
 It is empirical through and through, rather than speculative "in the 
 bad sense of the word"; it is concrete rather than conceptual. The time 
 that consciousness holds in its grasp has real duration; instead of being 
 an indistinguishable dividing line, it owns a real succession, — it weights 
 consciousness with actual concrete movement of facts. And, as we 
 have insisted so much, it is this very inclusiveness that, understood 
 from the side of its ground, stamps consciousness as to some extent 
 transcendent. Of course, the individual consciousness known to each 
 of us includes only a very finite amount of sequence within the boundaries 
 of its horizon. But then, this consciousness itself is finite too. The 
 fact that its span is limited does not, on the one hand, make it any 
 less a real inclusion of time relations within itself; nor, on the other, 
 does it imply that time, as viewed from the standpoint of such experience, 
 is conceptual or abstract. Time that is only symbolically represented 
 in thought is, in so far, not the concrete, immediate, passing change in 
 experience and so is not in the real sense of the word transcended by 
 consciousness at the given moment. And if consciousness transcends 
 time to just the degree that, in its existence, it rises superior to the mutual 
 exclusion of all the infinitely many parts of the time continuum, then 
 the time which, though mathematically infinitely divisible, is never- 
 theless present to consciousness as a whole, cannot be abstract any more 
 than the existence of that consciousness itself can be abstract or "con- 
 ceptual." In other words, the specious present as such means that a 
 definite amount of actual transition, not simply of thinking-about-a- 
 transition should be immediate to consciousness. 
 
 Of course, when the absolutist says that, just as our finite conscious- 
 ness spans a finite amount of time, so an infinite consciousness would 
 cover, in its single glance, an infinite amount of time, he is deahng in 
 what must be, for him, only symbolic and conceptual. But so is any 
 world view when presented by any one not immediately conscious of 
 the whole world itself. But if this is a fault, then all inference is fallacy, — 
 all conceptual thinking, even though it be about concrete things, is a 
 fallacy of abstraction. That surely is a little extreme, especially for a 
 philosopher ! 
 
36 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 Down to this point very little has been said about a metaphysical 
 aspect to the problem. Granted that time, as we know it, is really a 
 construct of relations in experience, perhaps that does not say what it is 
 in itself. The whole world of things is, for that matter, in a sense my 
 ideal construction, — in so far as I can be said to "know" it rather than 
 merely to feel it. Surely something exists ! This may roughly represent 
 the attitude of the reader at this stage of the discussion; and to this 
 consideration we shall therefore turn at once. 
 
 The apparent "reductio ad absurdum" of this criticism it is possible 
 to accept completely. To be sure things are also conscious construc- 
 tions as much as is time. We have said in the introduction that change 
 is just as real as are the things themselves that change. It is not a sur- 
 face phenomenon. And we also saw that the reverse side of change is 
 the correlative fact of time, which is therefore just as real as things. 
 But if there is one point on which modern philosophy is practically 
 unanimous, it is in its complete repudiation of the old Kantian things- 
 in-themselves. Things as elements in experience we know directly, 
 but the notion of noumenal things is as useless as it is meaningless; 
 the things-in-themselves are as unaffirmable as they are unknowable. 
 And in a similar way, the outcome of the foregoing discussion of the 
 notion of time is simply to deny that there is any cause for holding to an 
 objective, metaphysical time-in-itself. If the other relations that hold 
 good in experience, such as far and near, large and small, substance 
 and quality, cause and effect, etc., are to be understood as functions of 
 intelligent relating activity, and as having their only conceivable 
 reality there, then exactly the same thing is to be said of the temporal 
 relations of coexistence and sequence. And it is no more queer in the last 
 instance than in the former ones. And surely if one adopts the view 
 that ideas are essentially and only instrumental, rather than representa- 
 tive, this conclusion follows of its own weight. 
 
 Of course, there are some ways in which time really seems to be an 
 entity in itself. We say in common parlance, it "takes time" for things 
 to happen. As soon as the cause of a fact is complete, the fact should 
 be real, but we find that a necessary part of such cause is always a cer- 
 tain amount of time; before this is given the event cannot happen, no 
 matter what the driving force behind it, and with the requisite time the 
 causal setting is made complete. Thus the time element does indeed 
 seem to "make a difference" in things. But, should there be anything 
 plausible in the foregoing, let the following suggestions be considered: 
 (1) The time relations are certainly real, but are they any more real 
 
THE RELATIVITY OE TIME 37 
 
 than are the other relations in the world of phenomena? Is the age of 
 anything any more real than its size or shape? Is the hour that is 
 struck more real than the clock that strikes it? If the practically infinite 
 sweep of cause and effect that relates everything in the universe to every 
 thing else, — if that can be understood as having its reality as a function 
 (in this sense as a "category") of Intelligence, and so as requiring no 
 reference to any archetype having an extra-mental, independent, 
 noumenal existence, it would not seem like a greater stretch of the 
 imagination to regard in a similar way the relations of coexistence and 
 sequence that hold within that Universal Life. And (2) to make time a 
 thing in any real sense of the word is completely to detemporalize it. 
 Things may grow together in a temporal way, but it is a simple con- 
 tradiction in terms to regard time itself as one of these things. 
 
 If there is no ontological entity or continuum corresponding to our 
 conscious time, are we compelled, then, to say that time is "only" 
 or "merely" subjective? That all depends on what one means by 
 "subjective." (a) Time is not subjective in the sense that it is arbi- 
 trary or consciously doubtful or tentative, (b) It is not subjective in 
 the sense that it is an individual whim, or in any way special to me. 
 We saw above that our notion of the "right" time has a very evident 
 social reference. Time seems to be a common measure of experience 
 in general, (c) It is not subjective in the sense that only the conscious 
 subject in experience is conditioned by it. It is just as real in objective 
 experience as in subjective, if indeed not a little more so since we are 
 perhaps more conscious of change in the objects of experience than in 
 ourselves. But it is subjective in the sense that it is not an independent 
 reaUty transcending intelligence and conditioning it from without. 
 If conscious experience could be blotted out there would be no such 
 thing as time; such words as "now" and "then," "before" and "after," 
 "past" and "present," etc., would be absolutely inapplicable to the 
 nothing that would remain. In this rather derived sense we may say, 
 and I believe must say, that time is merely subjective, — that is to say, 
 subjective in the same sense that all other relationships of experience are 
 subjective. 
 
 But at this point there may come an objection from another source. 
 We are convinced that there is a real time that is infinitely divisible and 
 also infinitely long. In conscious experience we find no such fact as 
 this, and yet we cannot deny its ultimate truth without giving the lie 
 to our whole time-consciousness. If the fact of infinite divisibility be 
 real, then the real present is the mathematical vanishing-point of an 
 
38 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 infinite process of division, — i. e., zero duration. If the proposition that 
 time is infinite be true, then the Hmitations which the very process of 
 ideal determination seems to require are only apparent, and real time, 
 as over against this, is infinite. Therefore, in its own marks of frag- 
 mentariness and crude approximation, our conscious time reveals its 
 inherent reference to an ultimate and extra-mental Time beyond. But 
 even this sort of argument does not turn out to be conclusive. 
 
 If the idea of infinity and infinite divisibility has no basis in concrete 
 experience, where, in the name of all reason, does it come from? We 
 seem to know what infinity in both directions means; at least we know 
 the essential "marks" of these things well enough to recognize their 
 absence from our own span of duration. The fact is, of course, that 
 the notion of infinite time is an ideal extension of the duration we actu- 
 ally grasp in a concrete way. I know what the astronomer means when 
 he says that the sun is 93,000,000 miles away, but I cannot claim to 
 experience that distance in any concrete fashion. For an idea to be real 
 and true it is not necessary for it to be reduced to the photograph or 
 moving picture form. So, with reference to these ideas of the infinity 
 and infinite divisibility of time, we hold (a) that they are based on the 
 facts of direct conscious experience. These ideas, like any other ideas, 
 are the constructs of the idealizing process. We Hterally "think" 
 them; we do not swallow them in capsules. And, (b) in the next place, 
 these ideas are true. But instead of proving that therefore time is 
 outer and extra-mental, this proposition only proves the reverse, viz., 
 the conclusion for which we have been contending all along, that the 
 time fact is essentially a form of relating experience elements. In 
 support of this latter contention we shall therefore proceed to show 
 (1) that the idealist theory of time gives an intelligible meaning to the 
 notion of its infinity, and (2) that the idea of infinite divisibility receives, 
 on this hypothesis, the only explanation consistent with the fact that 
 we have a consciousness of time at all. 
 
 (1) If time is a form of conscious synthesis, its infinity means just 
 that, as a rule or law, it contains no provision for a stop; indeed, as a 
 law it is contradicted or annulled by the interposition of a limit. Thus 
 I know it to be infinite simply because the law of the series admits of 
 no final term, not because I have actually followed it out to an infinite 
 number of terms to see if there be an end! The series 1, K, M, /^, . . 
 . . . is an infinite series, and yet, to know it as such, we need only 
 see that the law of relating its terms admits of indefinite application. 
 And so it is with the idea of time. If we trv to conceive of time as some 
 
 r 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 
 
 ultimate trans-experiential fact, then infinity for it could "fi"^'^" 
 ateot te ndetermination,-which means absolute unreabty and nothmg- 
 n s But if we regard it as a form of relating elements m experience, 
 th n it is iust as re'al as those related elements are, and Us mfimty n, 
 the only conceivable meaning of the term when applied to a law) .s a 
 nerfectly valid inference from its actual nature as a concrete fact. 
 '^ (2) And its infinite divisibility, on the view here defended, woud 
 be nefpreted in a precisely analogous manner. Time . mfimtety 
 divisible But this does not mean that it is mfinitely d vided. As 
 known n experience it is not a sum of zero durations, nor o mfin, tesmal 
 increments that are nearly zero but not quite. Nor even >s.t made up 
 of a sum of " minimum discernible" conscious units of duration^ Jhe u™ 
 of time is always relative to the purpose in hand. I say the _ p n 
 century", if it is my purpose to compare centuries, «■• *e Pre^ "» 
 minute" if minutes are the objects of my current reasoning. The mini 
 mum discernible is the unit of conscious time only when my pres n 
 purpose is to realize the most minute distinction of ^^q"^""/^'^^ J 
 L capable of making. But the notion of infinite d'V-b.hty like 
 that of infinity, is an ideal extension of the conscious fact to its 
 delly known mathematical Umit. It is the result of PO-t- analyst. 
 If the possibility of temporal synthesis is before my mmd, I find that 
 an rea'Se it in a concrete way over but a small scope o e.xper,en 
 i. e., the scope of my specious present. But I can -^ ^at as a law 
 of synthesis it is endless, and thus ideally it is mfimte. Simila ly, 
 when I a mpt the process of temporal analysis, I find that I can reahze 
 nta concrete way'only to a limited extent, i. e., to the ™-um dis 
 cernible But, as before, the law of the process provides for no stop 
 and I can see ideally that it is infinite. This gives at least a real and 
 possible meaning to the notion of infinite divisibility 
 
 Is there any basis, then, for the premise so o ten set "P. "^ ™ 
 instant can possibly exist at once? On what I ^-^■\ff''''^^^ 
 view of time, this means simply that we cannot •'d^"' *e same wo 
 Ivents as both coexistent and sequent. Of course, no two m tants o 
 Ume can possibly exist "at the same time" because this simply den s 
 th"t they were really two instants in the first place. Or, from a shghtly 
 dffi rent'angle, H only means that once you have related two events in 
 terms of before and after, the first is past, when considered from the 
 s "dpoint of the second, and the second is future w.th re erence t 
 the first etc. They are still events of consciousness and known only as 
 such td there i^ nothing in their inevitable sequence or temporal 
 
40 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 otherness or mutual exclusiveness (which latter is all included in the 
 simple fact of sequence) that implies that they should not both exist 
 within the range of a single conscious present. 
 
 At the risk of repetitiousness it seems wise to insist here again that 
 once we try to reverse the order of importance, and think of conscious- 
 ness as existing in time (that is, in an absolute present) instead of think- 
 ing of the present as a determination in consciousness, we are met by 
 the familiar difficulties: (a) the absolute present is only the thinnest 
 abstraction from concrete life, which taken in itself leads to all the 
 traditional logical impossibilities; and (b) if consciousness were really 
 in time, then it could exist only in the present of that absolute time, 
 which, true to Augustine's logic, not only could never be known as such, 
 but telescopes itself into a durationless present, which amounts to a 
 complete canceling of it. 
 
 We have seen that the actual psychological present, as a simple 
 matter of empirical fact, is not a durationless point, but is "specious," — 
 has a real time content. We must now point out how utterly hopeless 
 it is to try to determine or define the present on any other basis. The 
 present facts of the outer world do not differ from past facts in any 
 assignable feature except their concrete presence to consciousness. The 
 laws that control the events of today are the same as those that were in 
 force yesterday; the application of mathematical formulae to the one 
 is as direct and simple as to the other, — if, indeed, there is not a slight 
 advantage in favor of the past; they seem equally rich in qualitative 
 content, — the red or cold or sour of yesterday resemble indistinguishably 
 the red and cold and sour of today; even the temporal relationships of 
 event to event — the inevitable before-and-after — show themselves just 
 as real and measured in the organization of yesterday as in that of today. 
 And so with the future. The "will-be" of moments to come is just as 
 definite, regular, dependable, clear-cut, as the " has-been" of yesterday 
 or the "is" of today. Now, apart from all reference to consciousness, 
 let one simply contemplate the continuous series of events of which the 
 present moment is one, and see if there is anything about the latter that 
 will distinguish it from the rest, — supposing for the moment that this 
 durationless partition between past and future could be distinguishable 
 at all. Our observer must not seek for a unique point of change, for 
 the whole series is made of change. Perhaps, if he cannot make out 
 the dimensionless area (!) called "present," he can at least see some 
 
THE RFXATIVITY OF TIME 41 
 
 difference between future and past, and then infer that the illusive 
 present moment lies somewhere between the two. But here again his 
 common criteria are forbidden him. He must not say that the future is 
 the locus of the objects of purpose, because, once more, that is to appeal 
 to consciousness. He must draw no distinctions between memory and 
 expectation, hope and regret, etc., since that, too, would be anthropo- 
 morphic. And it is very probable that, with his resources thus limited 
 to a reality considered as an objective mechanical series only, he will 
 come to the conclusion that time is an unbroken continuum, change 
 an unbroken series, and the distinction of past, present and future a 
 delusion of consciousness only. What a queer road to timelessness 
 after all! 
 
 We have spoken in the foregoing of the relation of change to the 
 present. If, now, we do not labor under the restrictions there placed 
 upon our h}'pothetical observer, but leave ourselves free to come to any 
 conclusions whatever that the facts seem to demand, we do find undoubted- 
 ly a strange interrelationship between change and that irreducible con- 
 crete glow we call the present. Common sense at any rate would at 
 once insist that, however much the past, like the present, may be a 
 kingdom of change, yet changes do not occur in the past as past. The 
 change belonging to any given moment only really occurred when that 
 moment was present, — when it was molten, flowing, living. To be 
 sure change requires time and, if it must be thus spread out when it 
 happens, it looks as if that present would have to be a "specious," not 
 a mathematical one. But then, for immediate purposes, we have 
 allowed ourselves recourse even to such a consideration as that, if such 
 should seem necessary. The past is a region of change, and yet we say 
 change is real only as present. In other words, while the past by its 
 very definition, admits of no change, we can only describe it in terms of 
 change. Is there not some confusion here? 
 
 There are at least two ways in which the past is at the mercy of 
 some kind of present. (1) In the first place, as we have suggested 
 before, the past "is" real as past. There is a real past in our universe 
 of reality. Perhaps no one will question that. Now let us ask, what 
 would happen to that "past" if the present should be wiped out of 
 existence? Then we could no longer say that there is a real past because 
 all conceivable content of the "is" would be cancelled. Of course, 
 it would be a hard saying to insist that the past, the only past in all the 
 world, exists only in the present, — in some sort of a present at any rate. 
 And yet, what else can \\t say under the circumstances? Strangely 
 
42 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 enough even the past threatens to confront us with the idea of Absolute 
 presence! And now (2) the converse of the above is also true. While 
 the past is real as a past, it was real only as a present] That is, to say- 
 that a given event is really a past event, is only another way of saying 
 that it was once present. If some playful god could just cancel from 
 its reality that image of the temporal present, it would cease completely 
 to be real, even as past. Thus, once more, reaUty seems to balance 
 itself somehow on the concreteness of the present; when that point is 
 gone the whole structure crashes into nothingness. 
 
 If we return, now, to the question above encountered with reference 
 to change, we may not be so much surprised that the change of which 
 the past is built should seem to have about it such a strong suggestion 
 of the present. While the past is a series of changes, it is equally true 
 that change, (1) requires time in which to happen, and (2) requires that 
 that real time should somehow be present in order for the change as 
 real movement to be a fact. And it must also be evident by this time 
 that the specious present of consciousness answers exactly to this seem- 
 ingly paradoxical description. Suppose we are wilUng to grant that the 
 present is actually this function of consciousness, — not that the real 
 present somehow just "is," while the specious present of consciousness 
 sticks out, so to speak, at both ends and surreptitiously displays as a 
 part of the present what is really a portion of the past and of the future, 
 but that, on the contrary, the enduring, living present of consciousness 
 is indefinitely the more real of the two, — the mathematical, instantane- 
 ous present of science being only a limiting concept in a process of abstrac- 
 tion which could no more be real than a plane without thickness could be. 
 Then (1) in the first place, we make room for real change with its seem- 
 ingly contradictory presuppositions of presence and duration. And 
 again, (2) with the real present once shaken loose from that harrassing 
 dilemma of the mathematical point, we can offer it without embarrass- 
 ment as a wider, safer basis on which, as we saw above, even the past and 
 the future must somehow stand. It may indeed be that the specious 
 present of our own consciousness, however concrete and living it may be, 
 is still too narrow a foundation to support the teeming infinities of time 
 that stretch out from us in both directions. It is conceivable, even, 
 that an all-embracing Absolute present should, in the last analysis, 
 be required. But the essential point here is that the present is not a 
 point or a plane, but a real, spread-out field of consciousness, even in 
 our own limited, finite world. The other question need not immedi- 
 ately concern us. And finally (3) while the vanishing mathematical 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 43 
 
 present utterly cancels the real intelligible present of consciousness, the 
 larger present, assumed as fundamental, does allow ample ground for 
 the exact present of analytical mechanics, by regarding it simply as 
 the limit of a converging series, the exact content of its final term being, 
 while scientifically useful, as far from the distinguishable content of 
 experience as is the exact value of H. 
 
 As a simple matter of "checking up" our conclusions down to this 
 point, one further observation will be useful. The idea of change is 
 indissolubly bound up with the idea of the present, and the present 
 turns out to have its roots in consciousness. In such a case it is but 
 natural that there should be the close relationship between change and 
 consciousness that modern psychology everywhere shows to be the fact. 
 Wherever there is consciousness there must be change in the object of 
 such consciousness. A changeless object of consciousness is almost a 
 contradiction in terms. And if the above-formulated relationships are 
 fundamental we might add as a corollary to this that where there is 
 consciousness, there is also a real present, although it needs no expert 
 syllogizing to discover that! But the end is not yet. If our other con- 
 clusions are correct, we may read both of these deductions in their 
 converse form and they will still hold good: (1) Wherever there is real 
 change there is consciousness, — since change requires the specious 
 present, and (2) wherever there is a present there is consciousness, — 
 since a present without consciousness turns out to be only a mathematical 
 abstraction! 
 
 And yet, to say that time is thus a function of intelligent experience, 
 is a conclusion intensely offensive to some people. As an example of 
 such antipathy we may refer to Professor Ladd who in most respects 
 may be classed as an idealist, but who insists upon regarding time in the 
 most realistic way. He courteously dismisses the idealistic view of 
 time as an "abject imbecility. "■'^ His chief appeal in so doing is to 
 " common sense," and his formulation of the view of common sense is as 
 follows: "Space and time are thus regarded in the light of 'universal 
 media.' Things, with all that they really are and all that belongs to them, 
 are 'in' these media."'" And the extent to which he agrees with this 
 common sense notion may be gathered from these statements of his own 
 view. "We begin by accepting the confession of everybody that, 
 
 *^ Theory of Reality, p. 189. 
 ** Ibid., p. 179. 
 
44 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 somehow, space and time are like 'media' for the orderly arrangement 
 of existences, of changes, and of relations."^^ And again that "the 
 continuance of time — as past, present, and future — must be regarded 
 as the medium in which things exist. ""^^ Thus he takes common sense 
 at its face value. Of course, it may be entirely right. Indeed, it is in 
 all probability just as accurate and final an authority on this question 
 as on any other of a highly technical nature. But along with this 
 authority he suggests an argument. In this he aims to show that 
 without some kind of absolute time there is no warrant that A's present 
 should coincide with B's, etc., and that "thus the purely subjective 
 view of time consciousness destroys the possibility of society, of history, 
 of the intercourse and development of the race." !*^ 
 
 Events, we are told, must have absolute dates. The event itself must 
 have "something to say about its own proper location" in time. Cer- 
 tainly, but the idealistic conclusion does not mean that the temporal 
 relations in experience are arbitary, any more than it implies such a con- 
 clusion in the case of any other realtions, — most of which Professor Ladd 
 is perfectly willing to regard as ideal. And even if such were the actual 
 alternative, it is not made evident how an extraneous tertium quid would 
 help matters any. 
 
 But there is a point of view from which his illustration may serve to 
 introduce certain interesting possibilities of speculation. How do we 
 know that our several "presents" coincide? Even if it be necessary to 
 conclude that we do not know for sure, that conclusion would be no 
 argument for Professor Ladd's view of an objective and absolute time, — 
 at least not until he explains how such a time could ever be known in 
 any other way than as an element in conscious experience; in any other 
 case the puzzle of relativity would remain and the external Time would 
 be only an additional and useless burden. As he has not done this, 
 we shall discuss the suggested problem in its bearing on the view, herein- 
 set-forth, omitting, for the most part, its relation to his realism. 
 
 In the first place, we must confess to serious misgivings as to whether 
 the question has any assignable meaning. How do you and I know that 
 our conscious time series coincide? Now, if "coincide" can in this 
 case have any other than a temporal significance itself, then the question 
 has meaning. Does the question mean to ask whether your present 
 and mine come at the same time} If so it is purely tautologous. Of 
 
 « Theory of Reality, p. 181. 
 « Ibid., p. 187. 
 " Ibid., p. 190. 
 
THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 45 
 
 course, they come at the same time, viz., the present! One asks, "Is 
 your present and mine necessarily identical?" Again we reply, Does the 
 question mean to ask whether a given event will be present for you 
 at the same time that it is present for me? If so, then again the question 
 is self -contradictory and absurd. But I am not sure that the question 
 necessarily implies a temporal basis of reckoning. I shall assume that 
 it is possible to distinguish a factual or logical coincidence from a temporal 
 one, and discuss the question on that basis. Of course, if the distinction 
 I refer to is impossible, then the question is absurd, — and so is the 
 reply! But for the present I shall take the chances! 
 
 What reason have we to think that the present in different subjects 
 should coincide? One's answer to that question would depend very 
 largely upon the view that he held as to the ultimate nature of con- 
 sciousness. We may consider first the answer that one would give 
 who embraced the individualistic notion of consciousness. And this 
 notion, by the way, is the one from which Professor Ladd's criticism 
 comes: he speaks of events as "being regarded from points of view which 
 are wholly subjective and so disparate !"^^ Of course, if personal con- 
 sciousness are by their very nature "disparate," they will be so with 
 regard to time relations, — as also with regard to all other relations that 
 one could mention. But even on the individualistic view of conscious- 
 ness this does not necessarily follow at all. He does not think of such a 
 thing in reference to any of the other phases of experience that he himself 
 regards as being relative to conscious life for their only reality. But he, 
 like the other thinkers of his school, considers that finite experiences are 
 coordinated through their common dependence on the Worldground or 
 Absolute, and it looks as if time relations as well as any others might be 
 so coordinated. 
 
 But if one holds that consciousness is really, in its very existence 
 and structure, a social continuum, then this problem is perhaps more 
 easily disposed of. The world of experience, according to this view, 
 acts to a certain extent in its entirety, and the present for my conscious- 
 ness would naturally coincide with the present determined by the whole 
 of which I am a part. However, there is one difficulty even here. I 
 may be a part of a social consciousness, but it is certain that this fact is 
 compatible with a large amount of individual difference on my part. 
 Some difference even seems necessary to make me a separate person at 
 all. Now, if my experience can differ in some ways from the experience 
 
 *'- Theory of Reality, p. 189. 
 
46 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 of Others in my group, I see no a priori reason why it could not differ in 
 its time forms as well as in the form of other relations. So, while the idea 
 of a social consciousness perhaps makes coincident time relations more 
 probable, it does not entirely settle the matter. 
 
 We have said "no reason why not," and "looks as if," etc. May we 
 not say that we know that the time relations of all our consciousness are 
 identical? I do not see how one could make good such an assertion. 
 One is reminded of Mr. Bradley's interesting speculations on this sub- 
 ject.^^ Not only might the same facts be related in reverse order by 
 different types of consciousness, but he even suggests a kind of magic 
 square arrangement, on which time relations could run at all conceivable 
 angles. The only reason I know of for not thinking that such perplexing 
 disparity is real is that there is no assignable reason for thinking that it 
 is so. It seems to me in every respect abstractly possible. 
 
 To sum up: The question is raised whether, if time be only a way of 
 organizing experience and not an ontological entity or media, the time 
 series of different persons might not be quite disparate. We answer 
 that it might indeed be so. It is abstractly possible. But it cannot 
 be accepted as an objection to the present view for the simple reason 
 that it seems to be "abstractly possible" on any view of consciousness 
 or any view of time whatever, and a consideration that applies to any 
 view cannot be the basis of discrimination against one of them. 
 
 ARE TIME RELATIONS UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY? 
 
 We have seen reason for thinking that time is, at least for us and our 
 experience, essentially a form of the process of organizing experience. 
 This does not mean that a congeries of "immutable" things are seized 
 by consciousness and related in a temporal way, which relation at the 
 same time tells us nothing as to the nature of the real objects related. 
 This would be to get back to the obsolete dinge-an-sich of Kant to which 
 no mental functions could possibly apply. And so far as that is con- 
 cerned, the notion of immutabiHty is, just as much as the correlative one 
 of mutability, a temporal affair and has no meaning whatever apart 
 from temporal relations. The facts of our experience that we know as 
 successive are really, not merely apparently, so. Their temporal rela- 
 
 *' Appearance and Reality, p. 216. 
 
ARE TIME RELATIONS UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY? 47 
 
 tions are as real as any other of their relations, and are actual features 
 of their cosmic existence. But still the temporal relations are relations, 
 and can be real only when the relating is somehow done; and can be 
 known, we have held, only when this relating is a constituent factor in 
 the activity of experience. In this sense, then, time is assumed to be a 
 "form of organizing experience." 
 
 A complete statement of this notion, however, necessitates the an- 
 swering of two important questions that will immediately suggest them- 
 selves. In the first place. Is this form of relating a universal one in 
 experience? and in the second place, Is it a necessary form of all possible 
 experience? These we shall take up in order. 
 
 When we say "universal," do we mean that one is always conscious 
 of the before-after relations in experience? If the proposition can be 
 stated in so simple a form as that, then the answer seems equally simple 
 and easy, — The time relation is not always present in consciousness. 
 Whether the feeling of satisfaction at the thought of having a thousand 
 dollars in the bank is or is not a state of mind in which time considera- 
 tions are absent, still, in the transport of artistic appreciation, in the 
 moment of contemplative absorption, in the spell of sudden insight, 
 we see states in which the sense of time is practically submerged; some 
 such experiences seem to possess other aspects of such vital and intrinsic 
 worth that the mind is blinded to their temporal importance or bearing. 
 In these cases, if the temporal relations are there, they are at least not 
 consciously there; they must he in some entirely different stratum of 
 reality than the one that is then lit up by the light of consciousness. 
 
 Indeed if, as Kant insisted, time is the "formal a priori condition 
 of all phenomena without exception, "^° we seem bound to modify the 
 statement in at least one very important respect. Not only do we have, 
 as just pointed out, many common experiences in which the relation is 
 not consciously or explicitly present, but modern psychology forces us 
 to deny that it could be in the same way and to the same degree an element 
 in every experience ; if it were it would be impossible for us ever to know it 
 at all. In such a case it would, in a very short while, get to be a "time- 
 subconsciousness" and finally a "time-unconsciousness," — if one may 
 pardon for the moment the ascription of ideal content known as such 
 to an unconscious element in experience. In other words, in order to 
 come to recognize the presence of the time element at all, it must vary 
 its role to some extent, and moreover, it will be known just to the extent 
 
 '•° Criliquc of Pure Reason (Miiller Tr.), p. 27. 
 
48 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 to which it does so. It has long been a truism in psychology" that an 
 absolutely invariable phenomenon would be beyond the reach of con- 
 scious discrimination. We must therefore insist that, if indeed it be 
 present in every experience, it is at least not equally present in every 
 state, and this seems to me to be giving up the whole contention in 
 principle in that, in such an admission, it is virtually conceded that its 
 reality in experience is a function of the relating process which varies with 
 the nature of the material related and the sort of purpose in hand. 
 
 It is simply a fact that experience, when considered from the stand- 
 point of its purposiveness, may always be related in temporal form. 
 Now if anyone chooses to insist that that standpoint may always be 
 taken with reference to any experience whatever, there is no apparent 
 reason for calling the statement in question, — except the fact that it is 
 wholly gratuitous. It amounts to saying that there is a time- 
 consciousness "potential" in every experience. But the fact seems to re- 
 main that the potentiality is not always realized, — that, so to speak, the 
 time aspect is not invariably exposed when, by the conscious process 
 of organizing experience, the insulation of settled, mechanical, subcon- 
 scious tendency is burned through. 
 
 Having granted that it may always be a "potential" aspect, at least, 
 of all conscious states (and there are always difficulties lurking in that 
 word "potential") shall we say with Kant that it is a foregone necessity 
 that such should be the case? In other words, is it inconceivable that 
 there should be such a thing as experience without this aspect? I do 
 not think that it is, and for the following reasons: 
 
 (1) The modern philosopher no longer tries to deduce the categories 
 (time being one) from the something-nothing, being-nonbeing premise 
 of the Hegelian dialectic. At most, one could only point out that time 
 is a very elemental factor in experience as it is for us, — he could not show 
 it to be in any sense a logical necessity, flowing from the very nature of 
 reason itself. But if such be the case, there is another side to the ques- 
 tion. Experience seems to be compatible with a vast variety of change 
 and difference, and it is quite impossible to say that the nonreality of 
 the time form would completely over-step the line of cosmic alternative 
 and render experience utterly impossible and the very conception of it 
 absurd. 
 
 (2) Kant calls it "a priori." Is this not true? Indeed, there is 
 a sense in which this conclusion seems certain. The English sensation- 
 alists failed hopelessly in their attempt to shake up "mere sensations" 
 in a hat and draw thereout a full-fledged time consciousness. Time, 
 
ARE TIME RELATIONS UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY? 49 
 
 whatever else it be, is not an aggregate of mere sensations of any sort 
 nor of assorted sensations of all sorts. It is a form of active synthesis 
 of the elements of experience into intelligible wholes. In this sense it is 
 a priori; and this is one great meaning that Kant gave to that word. 
 But it is not a priori in another sense in which Kant himself seems at 
 times to use the word. The proposition that experience should be tem- 
 poral in character is not one that overwhelms the mind with an irrcsis- 
 tably axiomatic force, nor can it be deduced from any such axioms. 
 In this sense it seems to be as contingent as is the space form in our 
 consciousness of the world. 
 
 (3) At this point the proposition may come back in a slightly 
 altered form. Kant urges one to try to banish the time relation from 
 his "intuition" and just see if he can do it! The experimenter will find, 
 we are told, that whereas he can think away any and all objects from 
 space, he cannot think space itself away; and, in like manner, whereas 
 the mind can do away with any particular event, or all particular events, 
 still he cannot think away the fact of duration itself; — i. e., that while 
 no concrete event seems to be essential to the reality of the world and the 
 vaUdity of knowledge, the fact of time itself is such an absolute pre- 
 requisite. As he says, "Time is a necessary idea which is presupposed 
 in all perceptions. We cannot be conscious of phenomena if time is 
 taken away, although we can quite readily suppose phenomena to be 
 absent from time. Time is, therefore, given a priori. "^^ And again, 
 "While, therefore, phenomena may be supposed to vanish completely 
 out of time, time itself, as the universal condition of their possibiUty, 
 cannot be supposed away."^^ 
 
 To this argument several repHes may be made : 
 
 (1) It is somewhat of a puzzle to see what duration would be like 
 in which nothing endured. If we are, as a sheer matter of fact, still 
 conscious of duration after we have tried to clear consciousness of all 
 sense of things and events and change, is it not more legitimate to con- 
 clude that we have not really washed the slate clean of concrete facts, 
 than to insist that we have time left as an omnipresent, though empty, 
 reality? According to Kant's own analysis, space and time are only 
 "forms" of intuition, and both form and "matter" are organically 
 necessary to any consciousness whatever. To intuite empty time when 
 all temporal facts have been unconditionally dismissed from conscious- 
 ness is, if the critical conception of knowledge has any truth in it at all, 
 
 " Critique of Pure Reason (Miiller Tr.), p. 24. 
 " Ihid., p. 25. 
 
50 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 a contradiction in terms. Indeed one is tempted to quote Kant's 
 own aphorism that while matter without form is bhnd, form without 
 matter is empty. The only objection one might have to quoting it 
 in this connection is that some reader might not notice the pun on the 
 word "empty" as used in these different expressions. Of course, the 
 very point we are trying to make is that it is impossible to be conscious 
 of empty time (on the Kantian hypothesis at least), while the quotation 
 seems to say that form without content is empty! However, I suppose it 
 is evident enough that the word is used once in a logical, and once in a 
 purely descriptive way. In other words, the judgment "Empty time 
 exists and stands in relation to my consciousness at least to the extent 
 that I know its existence," is by no means empty in the sense of being 
 without logical content. And according to the Kritik, it is just this judg- 
 ment that would be impossible. Kant himself, in another place, takes 
 approximately the same position. He says: "There is no way of proving 
 from experience that there is empty space or empty time. For, in the 
 first place, the complete absence of reaUty from a perception of sense 
 can never be observed; and, in the second place, the absence of all reality 
 can never be inferred from any variation in the degree of reality of a 
 phenomenon, nor ought it ever to be brought forward in explanation of 
 that variation. "^^ In other words, the knowing consciousness could 
 not "apply" the time form without something to apply it to, — i. e., 
 without some concrete content. But it must be evident that this 
 consideration, so well stated by Kant himself, completely undermines his 
 former attempt to prove that time is a necessary and universal form of 
 experience, since the argument there is, "We cannot be conscious of 
 phenomena if time is taken away, although we can quite readily sup- 
 pose phenomona to be absent from time." The fact is that duration in 
 which nothing endures, or time in which there are no real occurrences, 
 looks suspiciously like an orbit in which there is no planet or a forest de- 
 prived of its trees. 
 
 Of course, the discussion here applies only to Kant's attempted 
 proof that time is a necessary and universal form of experience, and 
 appeals to his distinction of the form and content of experience, the 
 truth of which distinction we are not aiming to discuss. The only 
 question here raised is the one of consistency within his own arguments. 
 And we hold that if it is possible to think all facts and events away, 
 but impossible to get away from the consciousness of time itself (even 
 
 w Critique of Pure Reason (Miiller Tr.l, p. 141. 
 
ARE TIME RELATIONS UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY? 51 
 
 as SO emptied), then while this might show time to be a necessary phase 
 of experience, it would at the same time invalidate Kant's own more 
 general conclusions. 
 
 (2) To test whether or not time is a necessary form of experience, 
 we must not fix up for ourselves an experiment that is itself a rational con- 
 tradiction and then, failing to make any headway at it, conclude that 
 time is therefore an inevitable relation in the world. Professor Fuller- 
 ton" has long ago pointed out that most people, to test the inevitableness 
 of the space form, try to imagine what is in the space beyond the limits 
 of space, or what would exist in the place of space if it were away, — 
 when "place" and "away" and "limits" and "beyond", etc., are all 
 spatial terms and presuppose the reaUty of space for their only con- 
 ceivable application. Similarly, in order to satisfy ourselves that time 
 is a necessary form of all intuition, it will hardly do simply to try to 
 imagine what an interval would be like in which there was no time, when 
 all the terms of the problem are thus temporal in meaning and when 
 it is obviously a foregone conclusion that we could find no nontem- 
 porality there. 
 
 (3) And finally there is another reason why so simple an operation 
 as merely thinking time away offers little hope of demonstrating any- 
 thing. The trouble is that in such an effort attention stands in its own 
 light. We try to abstract the time element entirely from experience and 
 then see what is left, and it is evident that such a procedure merely 
 makes the temporal aspect the chief thing to be dealt with rather than 
 an omitted consideration. It is something like trying to press the pain 
 out of a boil; the pressure only heightens its emphatic presence. It is 
 a familiar fact that the only way to drive a given element from con- 
 sciousness is to center attention really, not merely ostensibly, on some- 
 thing else. As a matter of fact, the more we try to make the-world- 
 minus-its-time-aspect the object of consciousness, the more sure we are 
 to find that the time consideration that is thus made an integral part of 
 our object has all the earmarks of the time relation when the latter 
 is applied to any other object in consciousness. In other words, 
 the experiment might succeed, if at all, only when the time relation was 
 wholly submerged by other interests, — that is, in a state of mind abso- 
 lutely antipodal to that of the suggested experiment. Indeed, if one be 
 fond of paradox, he may put it thus: that the less one tries the experi- 
 ment the more probable is his success; or, the more the present aim is 
 unrelated to, and disparate with, the object and aim of the experiment, 
 the more liable is the object of the latter to be reaUzed. 
 
 " Introduction to Philosophy, p. 76. 
 
52 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 We are not, therefore, surprised that Kant failed to think time 
 away as easily as to neglect this or that concrete event in the temporal 
 series. And we suspect that the "time" he still found on his hands 
 after he had "supposed phenomena to be absent from time", was really 
 a very complex stream of events, even though these events were only 
 respiratory movements, heart beats, artery pulse in ears, neck, forehead, 
 etc. and all the other trooping shadows of cutaneous and organic sensa- 
 tion that flit across the stage of consciousness in the dim light of quiet 
 contemplation, but which ordinarily elude our definite grasp. It is 
 not so true to say that the time form is inevitable, as that one can always 
 find events if he is conscious enough to look for them, or, which is the 
 same thing, that experience is always relatable in a temporal way when 
 we choose to view it in that aspect. 
 
 We conclude (1) that there is no available proof that time is either 
 universal or necessary as a form of experience. (2) That it is safe to 
 hold that it is not universal in the sense of being equally present in 
 every experience for (a) there seem to be some experiences in which 
 it is nearly, if not quite, absent, and (b) it could not be known as an 
 element in experience if it were equally present in every increment of 
 that experience. And (3) that, while it is impossible to prove that it 
 is not at least implicitly or potentially present in all experience, still 
 it is equally impossible to prove that it is necessarily there, and the burden 
 of proof would seem to lie with the afi&rmative. 
 
 Therefore, although time and change, like space and extension, 
 are very real in experience, we hold that their presence is as contingent 
 as it is real. Can we, then, imagine an experience the factors of which 
 would be related in ways wholly different in form from space and time? 
 No since, by hypothesis, that is a form of conscious construction that 
 is as yet entirely foreign to us. If we are unable to relate our direct 
 concrete experience in such hypothetical ways, it stands to reason that, 
 under the same hmitations, we would not be able to re-present such 
 relations to consciousness in terms of images instead. But, in saying 
 that space and time are contingent, we mean simply that there is no 
 a priori reason for thinking that these are the only possible laws in terms 
 of which experience can ever be serially organized. And the negative 
 conceivability of such now unknown elaboration of experience material 
 is in no way precluded by our mere inability to picture such a state of 
 affairs in concrete terms. With the growing complexity of experience, 
 and our increasing grasp on it and control of it, some very unpredictable 
 things might come to pass. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 53 
 
 TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 
 
 Having indicated in the foregoing our general attitude toward the 
 time problem, we shall now turn to a more interesting task, — that of 
 presenting in outline the views of time held by two of the great repre- 
 sentative philosophers of the present, Professors Eucken and Bergson. 
 These two are chosen, not only because of their intrinsic importance, 
 but also because they seem to stand at the opposite poles of the dis- 
 cussion. While one regards the temporal as an inferior aspect of reality, 
 the other makes "real" time the deepest fact in existence. Our chief 
 interest, therefore, is in the comparison of the two views, rather than 
 primarily in the content of either. 
 
 For Professor Eucken the problem of philosophy is at bottom a moral 
 and religious one. The major premise of all his arguments is this: 
 "Human life has a significance, an inner worth and value of its own," 
 Any world view, any way of thinking, that does not make room for such 
 real value, stands self-condemned. To be sure, it is not on this basis 
 that metaphysical schools are wont to debate their views, but it is this 
 reference to life, rather than to logic, that will ultimately decide between 
 them. A naturahsm, for instance, may be as logically consistent as a 
 medieval discussion of angels (and the Scholastics knew how to be 
 logically consistent!) but if it construes the striving, the sorrows, the 
 loves, the ideals of humanity as sheer swirls of atoms or vortices, or as 
 simply highly complicated organic chemistry, then that system of thought 
 with all its logical sparkle is doomed, sooner or later, to a place in the 
 rubbish heap with the other. If our thought world is too small and 
 cramped for the soul's needs, then the living soul will surely break it 
 down.^^ And conversely, if life, in order to reach its highest, fullest 
 expression, is forced to break the bonds of any system of thinking what- 
 ever, then that is proof absolute that that system was untrue. That is, 
 in a way his test of truth is the pragmatic test, though his definition 
 of truth, as we shall see later, is a thoroughly absolutist one.^*" And 
 this test he applies fearlessly to the philosophies of the schools, to the 
 creeds and concepts of the churches, to the ideals of whole culture move- 
 ments. Each is brought before the bar and asked, "If given complete 
 
 ^'' Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart, pp. 58, 69, etc. 
 *" Geistige Stromungen der Gegenwart, p. 49. 
 
54 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 control, will you expand or contract the meaning of life, ennoble or 
 cheapen it?" Human life feels the throb of spiritual power; human 
 philosophy must give it room! 
 
 That such considerations actually do decide the fate of philosophical 
 conceptions on the field of history no one, probably, will feel disposed 
 to doubt. Professor Eucken says, not merely that they do, but that 
 they should and must. If one refuses to accept this major premise, 
 then Professor Eucken's work is for him a stumbling-block only; to 
 one who does accept it, his work may be a revelation. His general 
 conclusion reached by following the method here indicated is that every 
 detail in the world's history receives its value, as well as its very being, 
 from the unseen world of the " Geistesleben" which includes and encom- 
 passes the whole series in a profounder unity, — that, through its non- 
 temporal presence to all the parts, organizes the otherwise hopeless 
 multiplicity of temporal succession into a living Whole. It is this Pres- 
 ence in the very heart of man that makes his life more than a mere 
 succession of events, — that raises it everlastingly above the mere rattle 
 of mechanical change; this, too, is the transcendent Source and final 
 Measure of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Our present interest 
 in this conception is, of course, not so much in the existence of the 
 "Geistesleben," as in its nontemporal character, although it must be 
 added that this characteristic is the preeminent one in the teaching of 
 Professor Eucken himself. We shall proceed to give as briefly as possible 
 his reasons for thinking that our consciousness, however much it may 
 enter into the series of temporal events, still has its roots in a timeless 
 world of Life. 
 
 First and most important of all, is the repeated and reiterated con- 
 tention that the ultimately temporal character of reality would be utterly 
 inconsistent with the integrity of moral" life. In order, in other words, 
 for life to have moral meaning, it must be lifted above the level of mere 
 events; it must link itself to a world that is higher than mere men, — 
 a world that is in some way a Hving Whole. While both may do good, 
 an act of deliberate self-sacrifice differs from a thunder shower in some 
 high and ultimate way. Both, as temporal events, vanish with the 
 moments in which they occur, and those moments, in the one case as 
 
 *' Geistige Stromungen der Gegenwart, pp. 322-403, especially 322-340; Der Sinn und 
 Wert des Lebens, entire. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 55 
 
 much as in the other, are infinitely divisible and tend to vanish completely 
 when we search for the fraction that has a present, real existence; both, 
 too, are, in their occurrence, parts of the web of mechanical causation 
 and change. Yet there is another side to the question. The one has a 
 meaning that does not vanish with the moment; it has a content that, 
 somehow, is not infinitely divisible but is, rather, organized as the 
 expression of a single purpose; it is bound in the chain of causation but 
 its essential ground was an "ought" that cannot be regarded as a link 
 in such a chain. In other words, the one was moral, the other was not. 
 Of course, it may be replied, nobody denies that a moral fact has 
 something about it that distinguishes it from facts that are not; so has 
 any general class of things to which we are able to apply any distinguish- 
 ing name. But it is not, on that account, involved necessarily in any 
 puzzles of timelessness. Indeed, so far as its purposiveness is concerned, 
 that would even seem to stamp it as doubly temporal, since the very 
 essence of purpose is the "forward look"— a temporal affair surely, and 
 a relation, too, that all temporal events do not obviously possess. 
 
 As opposed to this, however, it is Professor Eucken's specific point 
 that the very characteristics that make an event moral require that it 
 have a part in a time-transcending whole. Of course, a being, even to 
 be perfectly moral, would not pull away completely from the stream of 
 time and simply rest in the Eternal Quiet. Time is not a contaminating 
 evil that detracts from moral value; on the contrary, it is the field where 
 moral acts, like any others, must find their place if they are to be real. 
 But they must not stop with that. A fact that completely loses itself in 
 the temporal flow is gone when those particular moments of time are 
 gone and its relation to succeeding moments is at best only that of cause 
 and effect, precisely like that of the thunder storm. And furthermore, 
 the moments of conscious events, just as much as any other moments, 
 are as such different, mutually exclusive. Temporal things are literally, 
 as James says, "strung along"; the time relationship of before-and-after 
 is itself the disintegrating element that makes an infinite mvdtiplicity 
 out of any content whatsoever that it may have. 
 
 Indeed the case here is exactly similar to the spatial difficulty referred 
 to above. No one in the throes of life's crises can possil)ly convince 
 himself that all that is going on is a wonderfully complex performance 
 of countless separate spatial atoms. His feeling of unity, of responsi- 
 bility, of self, of personality resists all argument; he knows that some- 
 how an individual destiny is working itself out in his immediate neigh- 
 borhood. It may be ever so closely associated with the atoms but it is 
 
56 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 not, cannot be, identical with them. Nor, indeed, can it be a spatial 
 something that envelopes them. Space is divisible and geometrical, 
 but his consciousness of present strain and choice is not something 
 that has shape or size, or can be cut into fractions spatially. And just 
 as consciousness will not submit to being stretched out spatially over the 
 mutual externality of spatial points, so it resists all efforts to being 
 "strung out" in time. The conscious self has a unity that atoms in 
 spatial arrangement cannot have and, just as surely, it has an identity 
 that successive moments can never possess. Nor is the self a sort of 
 temporal continuity, — a string on which the moments of time may be 
 held together; for, however indiscernibly small may be the intervals, 
 they are still intervals. We can never hope to get them so short that 
 they would cease to be quantitative, — i. e., divisible. From every side 
 the " nacheinander" of the parts of time turns out to be just as destructive 
 as the " nebeneinander" of the parts of space, to any reality of a unitary or 
 identical nature supposed to exist in it. And if a moral act, or a moral 
 life, has inner organization and coherence, then this very character, which 
 the thunder storm does not have, is something completely counter 
 to the hopeless diversity of the temporal process, — something that, in 
 its own might, defies the pulverizing wheels of time. "Nur so lange 
 ist fiir den Einzelnen das Dasein eine rastlose Flucht von Erscheinungen, 
 ale er eines selbstandigen Innenlebens cntbehrt, nicht irgendwie zu 
 einem Ganzen personlichen Seins und geistiger Individual! tat gelangt."^** 
 Similarly with regard to the "ought" that is the ground of moral 
 conduct. This fact is in a sense a part of the cause of the moral act, — 
 "cause" in the sense that few if any (Kant says none at all) moral acts 
 would exist if it did not exist. But it is not a cause in the sense of being 
 a temporal antecedent. Indeed, if it were it could never characterize 
 the moral act as such, but only its antecedents. It would be a strange 
 sort of duty that always dropped out of existence just before its fulfillment 
 And yet that is just what the antecedents of an event do. No, "ought" 
 is a relationship to the whole of life, — a whole that cannot squeeze itself 
 into the narrowness of a passing moment, though it may give that moment 
 its inner character. Indeed, it might be taken as an interesting commen- 
 tary on this view of duty that the English word "ought" is tenseless. 
 
 While we still center our attention on the individual rather than 
 upon history as a whole, we may cite, as another reason for asserting 
 the existence of this time-transcending Spirit, the fact of knowledge. 
 
 ^' Geist. Strom., p. 270. 
 
TWO mrORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 57 
 
 An act of knowledge, like a moral purpose, is inconceivable under any 
 conditions that do not permit of inner organization and unity. The 
 subject-object relation, for instance, cannot be a simple spatial otherness. 
 To be sure, the object of our perception may be a spatial object, but its 
 role as object is something completely over and above the fact that it is 
 spatially before our eyes. To know it we somehow or other make it our 
 own; it becomes a part of the immediate content of consciousness, — 
 which would be quite impossible if its relation to us were determined by, 
 or constituted from, the thorough-going mutual externality of the parts 
 of space. But if there is in and above the spatial screen an all-containing 
 principle to which the objects of the world are immediately present, 
 then the presence of that principle in the consciousness of the knower 
 makes it possible that the separations and oppositions involved in spatial 
 otherness should be overcome. ^^ 
 
 And now, in a precisely similar sense, is a transcendence of some 
 sort necessary in order to nullify the disintegrating character of succession. 
 The moments of a judging act are not mutually distinct links in a causal 
 chain; the predicate is not the result of the subject, nor the subject the 
 mere temporal antecedent of the predicate. In other words, the quan- 
 titative, infinitely divisible character of time cuts the knowledge act 
 into impossible fractions just as surely as would the dominance in it of the 
 fact of extension, — except that the time relationship, as it were, cuts it 
 through another dimension, or parallel to a different plane. Either 
 type of multiplicity would be disastrous to knowledge were not the life 
 of the soul superior to the phantasmagoria of time. "Das Seelenleben 
 in ein Nebeneinander einzelner Bewusstseinsvorgange auflosen, das 
 heisst alien innern Zusammenhang preisgeben und damit auch die 
 Moglichkeit einer Wissenshaft von Grund aus zerstoren."^'' 
 
 And this relation to knowledge is perhaps seen best of all in the 
 character of truth. Professor Eucken is well aware that the nature of 
 truth is not an undebatable postulate in these days of philosophical 
 renovation. But leaving to one side, so far as possible, the question 
 as to whether or not truth is instrumental (On this point he says in a 
 somewhat ambiguous way "Die Wahrheit aber ist nicht ein blosses 
 Mittel zur Erhohung dieses Lebens, sondern sie gehort zu seinem Wes- 
 en.")^^ it is perhaps possible for all to agree at least in this, that the truth 
 fact is not a sort of coincident whirr that accompanies states of conscious- 
 
 ^' Geist. Strom., pp. 12, 35, etc. 
 «" Geist. Strom., p. 120. 
 " Ihid., p. 35. 
 
58 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 ness now and then, having, like the latter, duration and mutability. No, 
 perhaps that is overstepping somewhat the limits of what is commonly 
 agreed upon but to our author such a statement is of self-evident truth. 
 To ask whether a judgment is true or false is not to inquire concerning 
 its temporal relationships; it is not to ask what sort of events preceded or 
 followed or accompanied it, although these may serve as evidence as to 
 whether the truth is there. In fact, even the most ardent exponents of 
 such a view as we are now discussing make the truth as little as possible 
 a direct time function. It is a utility function primarily and temporal 
 only secondarily, through the fact that the use of the new synthesis 
 whose truth is in question requires time. I mean that, to find the truth 
 of a judgment, even Mr. Schiller would presumably not ask at exactly 
 what o'clock the thought occurred, or how many minutes it endured, 
 although he would say that if it were never drafted into active service 
 it would have no relationship to truth or falsity either one. But unless 
 one be singularly free from established systematic prejudices, it must 
 seem to him that the kaleidoscopic shifting of scenes, the momentary 
 flashing into being and dying out again of events in the narrow field 
 of the present, furnishes no adequate ground for the fixing of truth. In 
 the opinion of our author, the bewildering shuffle of this radical rela- 
 tivism can only be overcome through an appeal to a time-spanning World 
 of Spirit whose structure is not shaken by the vicissitudes of time. 
 While he holds, to be sure, that truth is not a passive intellectual posses- 
 sion, but rather, for us, an achievement that means much driving effort 
 and perhaps even suffering, yet the truth is not, cannot be, constituted by 
 such struggle.®^ Indeed, on the contrary, there may be vast ranges of 
 truth that have never yet found expression in the temporal field of 
 "warring elements," and yet truth, when we do possess it, is just the 
 presence of this ultimate self-equal Life in the striving, inner souls of 
 men.^^ Truth does not come into being through the simple formulating 
 of it any more than the objects revealed by the sweep of a searchlight 
 are created by the simple shining of its rays. The unseen world of the 
 Geistesleben constitutes just this solid ground of truth; it is this that forms 
 the essence of every real fact of knowledge; it is this that occasionally 
 strikes fire in the clashing conflicts of human conviction, and lights the 
 way of progress.^ 
 
 " Haupiprobleme, p. 45. 
 " Geisi. Strom., p. 122. 
 " Hauptprobleme, p. 31. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 59 
 
 If, now, the foregoing should seem lo display a pronounced leaning 
 toward the conservatist, absolutist conception, the next point that we 
 have to insist upon may have a slightly different bearing. While on 
 the one hand human struggles do not make the truth, yet on the other 
 hand truth always comes into human affairs in the concrete, flesh-and- 
 blood form of living activity, never in the dusty abstractions of the 
 closet thinker. Indeed almost any number of quotations might be 
 given to show how little patience he has with the thin-section truth of 
 the syllogism as compared with the heavy, three-dimensional truth of a 
 moving conviction or a ruling conception in history. Where work is 
 being done, where real value and progress are being achieved, there 
 the truth in its final sense is present. Indeed, he has been called a 
 "voluntarist" because of his assistance on struggle, achievement. And 
 he is quite willing to countenance that name, if only it be thoroughly 
 understood, that the timeless energy of the Geistesleben is altogether 
 higher, in its being, than the simple voluntary activity of men. He is 
 the first, not merely to grant, but to insist, that the effort to construe 
 the universe as a kingdom of Reason is a hopeless failure — we for- 
 get "dass Wissen nun und nimmer Leben zu ersetzen vermag, dass wir bei 
 jener Wendungstatt eines vollen und wahrhaf tigen Lebens nur ein Halb — 
 und Scheinleben finden."^^ That sort of a syllogistic, mathematical world 
 is too airy to support the leaden currents of real existence; no manipulation 
 of theorems and corollaries could ever produce the intensities of real life. 
 The transcendent Reality is one of power as well as meaning, of activity 
 as well as value; and the presence of it in any great amount in the con- 
 sciousness of a man is more a trophy, a hard-earned acquisition than a 
 passive reflection of Platonic order. And it must be admitted that, while 
 a static, Spinoza-like realm of pure logical truth is easier to harmonize 
 with the idea of timelessness than is a dynamic, active Unity of Spirit, 
 the latter is indefinitely more true to the apparent facts. To this con- 
 ception we must return when discussing the presuppositions of history; 
 in this connection it may be sufficient simply to have pointed out the 
 way in which this time-enveloping Geistesleben comes into the life of men. 
 
 One other point, finally, needs to be emphasized before we turn 
 definitely to the wider field of history. The "present" in human con- 
 sciousness is, afortiori, not the mathematical present of mechanistic 
 views. On the contrary, the present is essentially a possession of con- 
 sciousness; the amount of its content, the breadth of its view, the degree 
 
 " Hauptprobleme, p. 58. 
 
60 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 of command that it has over the flow of time and change, — all that is 
 determined purely by the strength of that consciousness itself in its 
 grip on the unseen world. This, we are bound to think, is a crucial 
 point in its relation to the timelessness of the Geistesleben in Professor 
 Eucken's theory. One's conception of the present, what it means and 
 what determines it, settles for good and all one's metaphysic of the 
 outer world. Is it possible to define the present, to distinguish it from 
 future and past, without reference to consciousness?^'' We have tried 
 above to show the futility of such an attempt. The mechanical, mathe- 
 matical present, the moment we go to examine it, shrivels up into a 
 plane or point that, of course, has no duration and so is not time at all. 
 Consciousness, even if it could be thought of as existing in such a shadowy- 
 place, could certainly not, under those circumstances, know change since 
 no change can occur in a single point of time, and it certainly could not 
 know its own identity because (1) the other states of consciousness with 
 which the present must identify itself could, on such a hypothesis, not 
 exist at all, — that is, they would belong only with the vanished moments 
 of the past, and (2) a consciousness of identity implies a knowledge of 
 change, and that in this case we have found to be impossible. And if, 
 accordingly, we retreat to the other alternative and put the present 
 within the scope and grasp of consciousness as a function of the latter, 
 we have practically the view discussed at greater length in another 
 section of this paper. Indeed we need only to state our own view in 
 other terms to say with Professor Eucken that, while the intrinsic char- 
 acter of time is the complete mutual externality of all its parts, yet the 
 absolute presupposition of the living experience of the world series and 
 for that matter of time itself, is that there should also be a deeper principle 
 of union, — that this infinite manifoldness and otherness should somehow 
 be sunk in an embracing Life that is not marked ofiF into an infinite mul- 
 tiplicity. And if so, then the "present" of this living experience is not 
 "ein blosser Punkt" but rather a time-transcending span. "Eine geistige 
 Gegenwart fallt uns nicht zu, sie will von uns selbst gebildet sein, auch 
 ist sie kein blosser Augenblick, sondern eine Befestigung gegeniiber dem 
 Augenblick, ein Leben geistiger Art."^^ To the degree to which a 
 man is raised above the Hfeless and perhaps the animal plane of simple 
 succession, just to that extent does he become an embodiment of the 
 supersensible Geistesleben. 
 
 " Geist. Strom., p. 270 et al. 
 
 " Geist. Strom., p. 264. Cf. also Hauptprobleme, pp. 57, 67, etc. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 61 
 
 It is above all as a philosophy of history®" that the work of Professor 
 Eucken will live. Not only is the inner understanding of the move- 
 ment of history of commanding aim of his work as a whole, but the very 
 arguments on which he bases his view of the world are, in the great 
 majority of cases, based upon the facts of historical experience. Espe- 
 cially is this true in the case of his view of time, since history is simply 
 the human phase of the time world taken in the large. And what is 
 true of history as a whole must reveal correspondingly the character of 
 the individual's reaUty who is, of course, only a fraction of that larger 
 whole. We shall therefore go at once to the favorite field of our dis- 
 tinguished author and ask with him what light the experience of history 
 can throw on our problem of the nature of time. 
 
 Here once more the foremost consideration is the moral one. Can 
 the work of the world go on if the moral life is without an anchor? Will 
 men strive and sacrifice just to hallow and sanctify moments that, the 
 instant they are real, vanish into a nothingness that is "too dark for 
 shadows and too empty for dreams?" Will they stand in awe of moral 
 laws whose only assignable sanction is that of a contingent, passing cus- 
 tom? Will they struggle and fight to cHmb higher, if they know they 
 are on a ladder that dissolves into nothing at both ends and leads to 
 absolutely nothing except more cHmbing? And on the contrary, does 
 it not redeem and glorify moral efiFort for one to feel that in the very heat 
 of the conflict, — yes, even by means of it, he is coming nearer to the heart 
 of the eternal? These are not Professor Eucken's words but they 
 embody his standpoint. It is evident that we have discussed the same 
 point before, only then it was with particular reference to the individual. 
 In genera] the moral issue turns upon the point of transitoriness and 
 absolute relativity as opposed to the abiding foundation of the timeless 
 Geistesleben that, in his system of thought, is superior to all the ravages 
 of change. This, of course, is absolutely opposed to the Pragmatist's 
 appeal for the reality of time and change, and oddly enough both sides 
 make their plea on the basis of the urgent demands of the moral life! 
 If there is an Absolute, say the Pragmatists, then the moral life becomes 
 a farce; it accomplishes nothing absolutely new or different; there is no 
 real movement in it at all. If there is no ultimate Whole that transcends 
 time, says Professor Eucken, then moral effort becomes futile and 
 absurd since it does not get anywhere; it has no real end or goal to attain; 
 it is a mere fighting of shadows; it is a meaningless, treadmill sort of 
 
 " Cf. Article Philosophie der Geschichte in KuUur der Gegenwart, Vol. on Sys. Phil. 
 
62 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 work that only leads to more — always more! — of the same thing! 
 Although, so far as I know, Professor Eucken nowhere discusses this phase 
 of the Pragmatist contention, the issue on both sides is so clearly drawn, 
 even in mutual isolation, that a comparison of the two types of thought 
 could not but be instructive. But a detailed discussion of this point 
 would take us very far afield and must be dispensed with. Suffice to 
 indicate the emphatic position taken here by the author we are dis- 
 cussing. It is safe to say (and this is written with his personal approval) 
 that the moral issue in history is his chief, though of course not his only, 
 reason for holding to the presence of a transcendent Life in the move- 
 ment of history. Instead of giving any specific quotations in support 
 of this interpretation, it would be better to refer to his writings as a whole, 
 especially to Der Sinn und Wert des LebensP 
 
 The older and more distinctly medieval view that the divine was 
 present in history only in certain definite miraculous events of the past 
 is becoming rapidly obsolete. The careful investigations of modern 
 historical criticism have shown that, when evidences are duly weighed, 
 all the periods of history come to look very much alike and the isolation 
 of any one as a time when the gods walked with men becomes increas- 
 ingly impossible. And as this leveling process goes on it becomes also 
 evident that it is only a matter of words whether we call it Pantheism 
 or Positivism or Mechanism, so long as we are not able to look beyond the 
 facts we see. Not only is the present individual shut off from any unique 
 relationship to the Whole, but there is not even a past glory to which 
 he may look backward. He is an item in a long list, — a very dreary 
 long list that gets longer and longer as research extends the boundaries 
 of known history. His moral code which seems to him to have so high 
 a sanction is calmly compared with a hundred other codes as one species 
 of infusoria is compared with others. His political inheritance that 
 has been bought with the blood of heroic men is, as a "form of govern- 
 ment," coolly compared with other little institutions created for the same 
 purpose, and points of similarity and difference duly noted. Even 
 his religion is put alongside many other similar movements in the world's 
 history, the sources from which it has come are critically inspected, and 
 the number of its followers duly estimated. All the relative intensity 
 and importance that he used to see in his ideals fades out of them during 
 this cold-blooded treatment and they become only details among count- 
 less others. The present becomes as dead as the past; the attempted 
 
 *® Cf. also Kultur der Gegenwari, Band Systemalische Philosophie, article by Prof. 
 Eucken, 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 63 
 
 vivisection has turned out, as it not infrequently does in other depart- 
 ments, to be a post-mortem. The particular time and the individual 
 Kfe are lost in the immensity of the whole. 
 
 And if, now, in discouragement, the seeker undertakes to forsake 
 the historical standpoint altogether and return simply to the present 
 and rejoice once more in the simple faith of his tribe, — to look upon 
 life through personal eyes again, he finds it as impossible to do as it would 
 be to revive the vivid faery world of his childhood. He sees now that 
 a present just for itself and out of connection with the past would be 
 simply a baseless puzzle, an atom loose in space, a meaningless noise in 
 the dark. If he accepts history in its wide systematic form, it promptly 
 engulfs him; if he forsakes it he is beached on an unknown shore: with 
 it he becomes only an incident in an infinite series; without it he is an 
 accident of chance! — "So befinden wir uns in einer hochst verworrenen 
 Lage, ja einem unertraglichen Dilemma: wir konnen die Geschichte 
 weder festhalten noch entbehren; wir geraten ins Leere, wo wir sie 
 abschiitteln, wir verfallen einem Schattenleben, wo wir uns ihr unter- 
 werfen."7o 
 
 Thus the supertemporal seems to be dismissed altogether and we 
 are left with a thorough-going positivism on our hands until, behold, 
 this very science of history calls us back in an unexpected way to the 
 conception of an over-ruling Unity of some sort.^' That is, laws are 
 found to hold good in the sweep of history, and laws require explanation. 
 There seems to be development and growth, the reality of which shows 
 inner connection and organization of long stretches of time. But if 
 the successive moments were as mutually exclusive and other as a 
 casual observation would lead one to suppose, how is this organization 
 (which, like any other type of organization, is a form of unity) to be 
 accounted for? Once more our author answers, only by the presence 
 in history of a supertemporal Principle, — a Principle that is not dissipated 
 into the infinitely many by the lightning shutter of the present moment. ^^ 
 
 Another consideration which may easily be construed as a corollary 
 to the above and which may help in an understanding of it, is that, on a 
 simple mechanical plane, it is quite impossible to have any standard 
 of evaluation of different events and, for that matter, any degrees of 
 value to test. In a chain all the links suffer the same tension; it is folly 
 to speak of one as more "important" than another. And in a simple 
 
 " Geist. Strom., p. 262. 
 
 " Ibid., p. 257. 
 
 " Ibid., p. 268. 
 
64 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 mechanical series no one step is more "significant" than any other. 
 The total importance of each and every moment is summed up in this, 
 that it is the consequent of the moment that preceded it and the causal 
 antecedent of the moment that is immediately to follow. Thus in a sense, 
 each one gathers up all the past and with equal completeness fore- 
 shadows all the future. One in its outward form may be a moment of 
 inaction and stillness; the next a cataclysm: but in reality the latter 
 contains nothing new or different; it only articulates the hidden secrets 
 of the apparent quiet that preceded it. Such a world knows no rank 
 nor condition; it is no respector of moments nor of men.'^* On this basis, 
 to speak of true or false steps in the history of humanity is like speaking 
 of true or false geological changes in the Silurian era. If, on the other 
 hand, there is some foothold, some rock that does not go with the stream, 
 it is possible from there to measure its changing currents. If in history 
 each event is related, not merely to a vanished antecedent, but to a 
 world of meaning and life that does not vanish with the passing of time, 
 we may speak of events as having more or less significance, and of ideas 
 or convictions as having more or less of truth. And, as we saw above, 
 even historical criticism tends in the long run to demand some such a 
 resource of interpretation. It becomes a "science of history" ; it organizes 
 its material as other sciences do; it finds laws to some extent inherent in 
 its data; it speaks of the "logical" or "natural" or "necessary" result 
 of this or that event, — just as if the apparently distinct moments of 
 time were really bound together in a unity analogous to that of an argu- 
 ment or a purpose!" It seems that even on the shifting and crossing 
 currents of history the explorer is able to find his way: perhaps there is 
 a compass needle that does not turn with the ship ! 
 
 And not only does some sort of time-spanning reality furnish such a 
 desired standard of evaluation but, we are told, it lifts man completely 
 out of the disheartening dilemma into which, as we saw above, he is 
 plunged by the positivistic view of history. He can assert his personal 
 importance in the very face of the bewildering multitude of historical 
 humanity; he can proclaim his own truth in the very midst of the Babel 
 of tongues. All this is his, if only he can show himself to be a child of 
 Eternity as well as of tim.e. "Die unerlassHche Voraussetzung alles 
 dessen abtr ist eine unmittelbare Gegenwart der ewigen Wahrheit durch 
 den gesamten Verl -,uf der Geschichte, di^ IVIoglichkeit, sich jederzeit aus 
 
 '^ Geist. Strom., p. 267. 
 
 ■* Ibid., p. 257. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 65 
 
 cdem Strom des Werdens in sie zii verselzen."'^^ Indeed, under these cir- 
 umstances the individual ftnds even a great advantage in his connection 
 with history,— the very connection that at first flush seemed to engulf 
 him. The world of the Geistesleben is high above the plane of mere 
 events; its inner riches are not thrown broadcast upon the air. They 
 must be fought for, taken by storm, and no one isolated man is equal to 
 the task. The greatest truths have been slowly and painfully won 
 throughout long historical movements in which the talent and even 
 genius of countless men have been employed. Take, for instance, 
 the essential heart of truth in Christianity, in Science, in Democracy; 
 how little c-uld it come in response to the efforts oi one man! As well 
 might he try, single-handed, to build a Roman Empire or a Panama 
 canal! "So bedarf unser Streben nach Entfaltung einer zeituberlegenen 
 Geistigkeit einer wirksamen Unterstutzung; eine solche liefert ihm aber 
 
 die Geschichte In jener (esoterischen Geschichte) mag ein 
 
 selbstandiges Geistesleben hervorbrechen, das durch alien Wandel der 
 Zeiten hindurch auch zu uns spricht und unser eignes Streben zu fordern 
 vermag."'^'^ Thus on the one hand the individual's own efforts are 
 powerfully reinforced by the numberless other factors in the historical 
 movement of which he forms a part and, on the other hand, he is thus 
 enabled by the very role he may play in history to have a part in a Life 
 that is high above the mere before-and-after of historical succession. 
 It follows that men differ in the degree to which they are carried 
 with the temporal tide. Many live lives but little above the sheer 
 mechanical level of successive sensations; some men are great because 
 of the strength of commanding personalities and their grip on truth. 
 And as men, so do events, differ in the degree to which the message of the 
 All is embodied in them. There is the humdrum of everyday life that 
 runs off mechnically, almost unconsciously; on the other hand, there are 
 the intense moments, the crises, the turning points that make the destinies 
 of men and nations. It is there that, in a special and unique way, one 
 feels the touch of the Everlasting. "Durch die ganze Geschichte bleibt 
 echte Geistigkeit und blossmenschliche Lebensflihrung in hartem Streit 
 
 miteinander."" "Das wahrhaft Grosse waren dabei nicht 
 
 einzelne Gedanken und Bestrebungen, sondern eine neue Art des Lebens 
 gegeniiber den Zwecken und Meinungen des Alltages."^^ 
 
 ^s Hauptprobleme, p. 67. O'. also Geist. Strom., pp. 268-269, etc. 
 '* Geist. Strom., p. 265. 
 " Geist. Strom., p. 266. 
 » Ihid., p. 265. 
 
66 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 Two other points remain to be noticed in this review. In the first 
 place, in history as in the individual life, real transcendence, real truth, 
 is reached not in logic-chopping syllogisms nor the bland and placid 
 reflections of the monk or recluse, but in the great spiritual struggles and 
 efforts of the leaders of men. The great truths, in history as in the 
 individual life, are mighty moving forces, — not mere sheen upon its 
 surface.''^ 
 
 And finally, if the life of both the present and the past has its center 
 of gravity not in the plane of the moments that vanish as fast as they 
 come, but in the transcendent unity of the Geistesleben, then there is 
 a way for the present to participate in the wealth of the temporally 
 vanished past without being simply the mechanical resultant of it.^" 
 I imagine that one might illustrate his meaning in some such homely way 
 as this: Suppose I touch one hand with the other; a strange sense that 
 both are "me" arises at once. That is, the experience is altogether 
 different than that of touching an "outside" object. And this feeling is 
 e\ddently nothing that comes simply from the end organs of touch, nor 
 is it due to any particular external conditions that mediate the contact 
 of the two hands. It comes from an inner relationship or unity that, 
 while active in the two hands, does not partake of their "twoness," — 
 that is not separated by their separation. Perhaps in some such way as 
 personality thus rises superior to the manifoldness of space, it in our 
 little lives and much more the Geistesleben in history, rise superior to 
 the excluding multiplicity of time. Thus the present feels itself part and 
 parcel with the past (and with what it knows of the future) because the 
 same Life throbs in it all. 
 
 Considerable space has been given to the exposition of Professor 
 Eucken's view of time and the timeless because, in the main, his method 
 is a very original one. The custom has been that the philosopher should 
 first work out his view of the world on metaphysical or epistemological 
 grounds and then construct his ethics and philosophy of history to match. 
 But in this instance the order is reversed. The ethics and philosophy of 
 history stand first in importance. To be sure he does not attempt a 
 philosophy of history or of the moral life in isolation from metaphysics. 
 On the contrary he considers a systematic world view to be of prime 
 
 " Cf. Geist. Strom., pp. 266, 268, 272. 
 8" Ibid., p. 267. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 67 
 
 importance. A part of the data for this view he finds, with Kant, in 
 the postulates of morality; the rest he gathers from the needs of the 
 historical life itself that it is the very object of that world-view to explain. 
 
 And, incidentally, there has been little attempt at criticism. The 
 reason is not far to seek. We have been interested in just one great 
 characteristic of the "Geistesleben,"— its superiority to the plurality 
 involved in succession, and with his view on this point the writer finds 
 himself in substantial agreement. There are other features of his con- 
 ception of the all-embracing Reahty that, to say the least, would admit 
 of some debate. But if we consider his conclusion with reference to time 
 to be that, in its ultimate existence, the World-All is not temporally 
 conditioned but that, instead, time as a connected series is a determina- 
 tion of that Life, then against such conclusion we have no complaint to 
 bring. 
 
 Of course, the object of this section of our discussion has not been merely 
 that of presenting the views of Jena's veteran philosopher, worthy as 
 such an aim might be. Europe has at present another great thinker 
 whose interest in the time problem is fundamental, whose treatment 
 of it is strikingly original, and M^hose final conclusions seem to differ as 
 wdely as do his micthods from those of Professor Eucken. We refer 
 to Professor Henri Bergson of Paris. Instead of starting from the facts 
 of ethics and history, his method is a psychological-biological one. 
 And instead of concluding that the basis of existence, the ultimate 
 Life of the world, is timeless in its inner character, he insists that it is 
 there and only there that "real" time exists! To this seeming antithesis 
 of the view above discussed we shall now turn, to learn as nearly as 
 possible how the two views stand related to each other. 
 
 Bergson 
 
 When one goes from the reading of Professor Eucken to Professor 
 Bergson's work he finds himself in a wholly new world. With the change 
 of language there is also a complete change of method, of standpoint, of 
 personality. The heavy and intense earnestness of the German is fol- 
 lowed by the amazing brilliancy and originality of the French philosopher. 
 Perhaps the difference is partly that between the time-honored little city 
 of Goethe and Schiller and the brilliant capital of France. 
 
 But underneath differences of form there are many points of agree- 
 ment. One leading conviction that is common to both is that truth does 
 
68 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 not live in the intellect alone, nor indeed even chiefly there. Both are 
 opposed to intellectualism, rationalism in any form. The mere concept 
 may stand for concrete experience, may act as substitute for it in our 
 inteUectual operations, but it is never equivalent to it any more than a 
 guide-post is equivalent to the city it points at, or a photograph to a man. 
 Real truth Professor Eucken finds in the wearing spiritual toil of indi- 
 vidual men and in the ponderous swing of history; Professor Bergson finds 
 it in the indescribable immediacy of intuition. That really final datum 
 for which the philosophers search and have searched so far lies so near 
 they overlook it. Like Sir Launfal they made long pilgrimages in quest 
 of the blessing that, without their suspecting it, is always waiting for 
 them at their very gates. In the inner life lies the secret of the outer 
 world. What is time? Tt is not an outer moving thing nor a mathe- 
 matical medium in which events are strung along. If one would really 
 know what it is he needs simply to gaze into the molten mass of the soul: 
 no matter if; as with a Swiss landscape, the better one sees it the less able 
 he is to tell us what he sees ! The important thing is that he should see. 
 One is reminded here again of St. Augustine "Si rogas, quid sit tempus, 
 nescio; si non rogas, intelUgo!" So also Henri Bergson. Inner experi- 
 ence is burdened with truth that the intellect cannot construe. It is 
 like attempting a chemical analysis of protoplasm; the reagents kill the 
 specimen. To be sure this conception of truth diverges from that of 
 Professor Eucken in the direction of mysticism; but both are opposed to 
 rationalism at all events, and are themselves not so far apart as might at 
 first appear. 
 
 Even for an introductory outline it is still necessary to present his 
 main conceptions a little more in detail. The essential nature of intelli- 
 gence, as opposed to instinct, he finds in its tendency to deal with its 
 world in a quantitative way, to project it in a conceptual, — i. e., inorganic, 
 mathematical, and in the last analysis spatial form. The mind constructs 
 its concrete world wholly in spatial terms; it is quantitative, divisible; 
 its parts are mutually exclusive and distinct. Intellect is the method of 
 dealing with environment by making tools out of inert matter, and mak- 
 ing use of these through a knowledge of their physical, calculable proper- 
 ties. Instinct is also a method of dealing with environment but it 
 consists in growing living organs to meet the demands of outer life. Man 
 knows geometry, but triangles have no such things as history or innerness 
 about them. He can make use of the simple quantitative relationships 
 of triangularity for this very reason that they involve nothing like growth 
 or change or decay. Bees, on the other hand, make hexagonal cells 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 
 
 69 
 
 without knowing any geometry nor any "why" of a matheniatical sort. 
 The latter method is obviously more convenient for the specific purpose 
 of building honev cells; the former is just as obviously more flexible, 
 capable, indeed, of indefinitely varied application. If the former enjoys 
 and preserves an immediate touch with specific, growing, changing 
 existence, the latter finds its own immeasurable advantage in the formula- 
 tion and understanding of general, though for that very reason abstract, 
 laws. Intelligence is successful so long as it can deal with magnitudes,— 
 can measure, separate, count, compare them. This is why the physical 
 sciences make such progress; it is also why Biology seems to succeed only 
 so far as it can be studied from physical standpoints.^^ And just as it 
 builds its outer world of objects, so it tends to construct its inner world of 
 ideas to match. Thus inner states are thought of as separate, countable; 
 they are associated, "added together," "broken up," etc., like veritable 
 things of the outer world. ^^ 
 
 As the author suggests, however, there is a certain advantage in this 
 sort of misrepresentation. The "outer" world in which society is built 
 up is this projected world of space and quantity. The inner life of my 
 personal organization is peculiar to me. Nobody else can know immedi- 
 ately how my personal experience "looks from the inside." The world 
 we share with each other is the physical world of perceptive consciousness 
 and that is a spatial one. Now it is little wonder that, in seeking to make 
 our inner life communicable, we should cast it so far as possible in these 
 same quantitative terms and make of it an analogy of space. Just as we 
 analyze the confusion of objective existence into unities and identities 
 and attach a word to each (and perhaps the definite naming is just one 
 phase of the analvzing), so we tend to break up the fluid, interpenetrating 
 life of consciousness into "states" and "relations" and emphasize the 
 mutual externality thus aimed at by affixing names, as before. And just 
 so far as we can reasonably carry this symbolic division of what, m its 
 truest self, is indivisible, to just that degree is personal, social communica- 
 tion possible. One thing, too, that contributes to the success of this 
 seemingly self-contradictory procedure is the fact that much of our life is 
 really lived in a mechanical way. In reflex and habit our actions are 
 often almost as devoid of inner consciousness as would be the correspond- 
 ing acts of a mechanical (i. e., merely spatial) automaton; and so the 
 spatial analogy of the discreteness of words serves to represent, with a 
 fair degree of accuracy, what is going on. And further: although lan- 
 
 " Creative Evolution, p. ix flF. 
 
 82 Cf. Time and Free Will, pp. xix, 128, etc. 
 
70 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PEOBLFM 
 
 guage may be primarily the product of our gregarious tendencies, it 
 comes at the same time to characterize our inner life. Just as we tend 
 to acquire mechanical coordinations for physical movement, so, too, we 
 acquire habits of thought; as we communicate with other people in terms 
 of language, so we tend to think in words and symbols, — at least so long 
 as our consciousness is of the ordinary, work-a-day sort. Thus the 
 spatial analogy of our intelligent processes, though based ultimately on 
 an error, turns out to possess enormous advantage in the mediating of 
 social intercourse and the systematizing of thought. 
 
 But on the other hand, we must not, because of these advantages? 
 forget the more or less figurative character of this way of dealing with 
 life. Just as the opinion that we write out in the form of a sentence is 
 not itself cut up into words and punctuated with commas and semicolons, 
 so our inner life cannot literally be granulated into a mass of distinct 
 ideas. ^^ It is on this account that our most momentous decisions, our 
 most profound loves and hates, are just the ones that find least support 
 in our symbolic thinking and are least expressible in words. If, in the 
 crises, our reaction seems nonrational, it is only that then the sovereign 
 Self has spoken, and in its presence all our pettifogging and logic-chopping 
 is of little avail; at such a moment all mere ideas and words, themselves 
 but the servants of that Self, must stand aside. That is to say, if our 
 purpose is not simply to communicate with others or to construct an 
 entertaining logical Castle in Spain, — if, instead, we want to know the 
 ultimate energy and impulse of the living World, we must forsake the 
 quantitative mathematical symbols of ordinary thought and "live into" 
 the actual movement and immediate experience of creative power. The 
 cinematograph presents a series of static views and these, when the 
 interval between them is made very short, may suggest very strongly the 
 fact of motion. But however rapid the succession of these simultaneities 
 may be, no real movement can ever be produced. Or again, shadows 
 may indefinitely resemble, and even serve to represent, concrete objects 
 in the outer world, but no infinite addition of the shadows could ever 
 produce a ponderable reality. Even so are the artificial entities of 
 mathematical physics and analytical mechanics powerless to give us any 
 revelation of the actual surging swell of the Ultimate. 
 
 Now in each of these realms, the symbolic, quantitative one of matter 
 and space and the real qualitative depths of immediate experience, there 
 is an element that we identify as time and this confused double identifica- 
 
 *' Time and Free Will, p. 164, etc. 
 
TWO IMrORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 71 
 
 tion is the heart of error in views of the reality of time. There is, on the 
 one hand, the outer time that we divide into hours or seconds or eras, the 
 homogeneous characterless medium of Newton, the independent variable 
 of our mathematical equations in theoretical mechanics and astrophysics, 
 the time that is infinite in length and in divisibiUty; on the other hand is 
 the experienced, inner sense of duration, the heterogeneous flow in which 
 things grow and grow old and of which no two moments are the same, the 
 time that, as it really occurs, eludes infinite divisibiUty by its very con- 
 creteness and baffles our most expert mathematical calculus. These 
 indeed seem to be two very different affairs, and if such a real dift'erence 
 is there it is futile to attempt to abolish it by christening both with the 
 same name. And Professor Bergson's startling suggestion is this: Call 
 the first one "space"; only the second one described above is real dura- 
 tion, real time! 
 
 Perhaps our first question in reply to this revolutionary program is, 
 "How in the world did two things so absolutely and fundamentally differ- 
 ent ever get confused?" And for his answer Professor Bergson takes us 
 to a very unexpected region of thought, i. e., to the psychological notion 
 of intensity. Here, before they come in sight of the time question at all, 
 philosophers, along with ordinary, unprofessional, common-sense people, 
 have become the victims of an easy fallacy, and all the woes of the time- 
 and-timeless controversies as well as the dogged hostihties of the free- 
 will debates result logically enough from this unobserved false step. 
 When I lift up a brick I am conscious of strain and exertion, and when 
 thereafter I lift two bricks with the same hand^ what could be more 
 natural than to say that I feel twice as much strain and exertion? Of 
 course, the second strain feels different than the first, but why not say 
 that this difference in feeling is a difference in quantity of feeling just as 
 the difference in the cause is the simple quantitative one of 2 to 1? In 
 the more personal relationships we are less tempted to this sort of reason- 
 ing. For instance, it does not take twice as much love to love two 
 brothers as to love one. But in the ordinary realm of sensation and 
 effort of a physical sort, we habitually speak of degrees of intensit}^ and 
 mean it, too, in an admittedly quantitative way. And just here, says 
 Professor Bergson, we err. To say that the sensation is twice as intense 
 because the stimulus is twice as large is to see psychic states refracted 
 through space. Considered apart from such analogy the sensations or 
 feelings are simply qualitatively different experiences possessing perhaps 
 more or less internal complexity, which can no more be measured in 
 
72 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 mathematical terms than "gusts" of emotion can be represented on a 
 weather map. 
 
 But if we once allow the spatial analogy a foothold in consciousness, 
 it tends to cover, in the same unpermissible way, more and more ground. 
 For instance, it prompts us to regard the inner sense of duration as twice 
 greater in one case than in another just because the hands on a clock or 
 the sun in the sky have moved through twice as much space in the first 
 instance. This, accordingly, is only one (though perhaps the most 
 important) application of the tendency of intelligence in general to 
 represent everything, even its very self, in spatial terms, and therefore 
 ultimately to misrepresent it. And if, then, it can be shown that all 
 quantitative calculation, including all distinct multiplicity and measur- 
 able magnitude and even the notion of intensity, is misdirected when 
 apphed to states of consciousness, then we need have no hesitation in 
 saying that the inner real time of our intimate experience cannot be the 
 "t" of the mathematical equations but is simply a unique and funda- 
 mental aspect of the living conscious being. And furthermore, if all 
 notions of quantity are as such spatial, then, of course, quantitative time 
 along with the rest is a spatial phantom, — the ghost of real duration. 
 These things Professor Bergson seeks to prove. 
 
 In what follows the intention is (1) to discuss his notion of magnitude 
 and multiplicity as apphed to conscious states, since this is a fundamental 
 premise in his conception of time, and (2) to seek to understand the latter 
 by means of a comparison of it with Professor Eucken's view on the same 
 subject. This comparison has been prompted by the fact that the two 
 views seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed to each other. 
 Whereas Professor Eucken holds that the intrinsic character and greatest 
 glory of personaUty is its power to transcend the merely temporal, the 
 Professor in the Collgge de France insists that it is in conscious life and 
 there only that time is real. If the conclusions of these men are really as 
 opposite as they claim to be, then we may fairly feel that at the present 
 writing the time problem is very far from a solution. And if it should 
 appear, on the other hand, that these two men, so different in method 
 and terminology and general aim, still hold conceptions that are in the 
 last analysis very similar, such an outcome might help us to be more 
 optimistic in the matter. 
 
 First, then, with regard to supposed quantitative features of psy- 
 chological states. Sensations, perhaps the simplest psychic elements, 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 73 
 
 are generally said to possess three attributes,— quality, intensity, and 
 duration. Professor James insists that they have extensity as well. 
 But this notion of extensity as an attribute co5rdinate with the other 
 three, Professor Bergson, I believe, does not consider. At any rate 
 there is no effort to refute James's theory while at the same lime all other 
 quantitative relationships are condemned precisely because of their 
 quantitative character. He does recognize extensity as a quality of 
 conscious states,^ but this is deUberately opposed to extension as the 
 property of the spatial world, and this latter seems to correspond to what 
 James means by extensity, in which case they are very far from an agree- 
 ment. Quality also is not so much discussed, but for the opposite reason. 
 He not only holds that quality is real, but makes it about the only attri- 
 bute of conscious states that is real, even duration being ultimately a 
 quality of conscious states. But we must not fail, here at the very start, 
 to form some exact conception of the sense in which conscious states have 
 quality. Take, for instance, a sensation of red. In saying that its 
 quality is one attribute of the sensation, we surely do not mean (1) that 
 the sensation of red is itself a red object. It would not show up in a 
 spectrum analysis. Nor (2) does this reservation necessarily imply that, 
 on the contrary, the red as such exists only in the thing of the outer 
 world. If it did imply that it would surely be wrong, as a slight acquaint- 
 ance with physics would serve to show. We have a sensation of red; we 
 do not, on the one hand, have a red sensation, nor, on the other, does our 
 sensation as an inner fact somehow stand related to an outer fact called 
 red. The red is the object of perception, the content of the perceived 
 fact, without implying any of these extreme hypotheses. This is surely 
 the sort of thing that is meant when we say that sensations have quality 
 as one attribute. 
 
 Now with this conclusion in mind, let us turn to the question of 
 intensity. Professor Bergson denies that conscious states have intensive 
 magnitude. This, being a quantity, is really a spatial metaphor read 
 into consciousness. But it must certainly be understood at once that 
 for the act of perception, considered as a fact in reality, to have dimen- 
 sions of magnitude is one thing; for perception, considered as a process of 
 apprehension, to embrace facts and relationships of quantity, is quite 
 another. And the question here must finally come to this: Do we not 
 perceive intensity just as really, and in the same sense, as we do quality? 
 And when it is put in that light I doubt very much that the facts will 
 seem to warrant a negative reply. 
 
 ^* Matter and Metnory, pp. 277-293. 
 
74 SOME VIEWS or the time problem 
 
 There are some features of Professsor Bergson's contention that we 
 readily admit to be valid, (a) For instance, most of our conscious states 
 are utterly irreducible to exact mathematical formulae. Love, hate, 
 ambition, anxiety, etc., can scarcely be rated by percentage, or any other 
 mathematical standard, although it certainly does seem valid enough to 
 speak of even these in terms of more or less, which are literally quantita- 
 tive terms. And, if we come back to simple matters of sensation, we may 
 well admit (b) that a bright light, for instance, produces a different effect 
 in consciousness than does a dim one. Wliat we find it hard to accept is 
 not that there is qualitative difference between the two, but that the 
 difference is wholly and only qualitative. Further (c) it goes without 
 saying that consciousness is not a sort of force of a varying power called 
 intensity that might conceivably be measured in dynes. But granted 
 all that, we could still be aware of greater intensity when looking at the 
 sun in the same way in which we are aware of its color as a quality. And 
 it is intensive magnitude of just this sort that would have to be disproved 
 in order to make out that quantity in general or time in particular was 
 not real as a constitutive relation in perceptual experience. The author's 
 analysis of our experience of differing intensities is very ingenious, and 
 his conclusion that in such cases there is always (1) a change in quality of 
 experience and (2) a change in degree of complexity of conscious contents, 
 seems to be entirely vahd. But his contention that these latter changes 
 sum up completely what we ordinarily regard as differences of intensity 
 is not convincing. 
 
 It might conceivably be replied to this that we can be just as vividly 
 aware of a dim illumination as of a bright one, — such at least seems true 
 enough as a psychological fact. But (1) this would not help the opposing 
 view any since it virtually admits degrees of consciousness. Equal 
 quantities are just as much magnitudes as are unequal ones. And besides 
 (2) the equal awareness in case of the less intense stimulus is generally due 
 to the presence of other ideas or concerns than the simple sensation 
 resulting from it. For instance, a child shut up in a dark room may be 
 even more vividly aware of the darkness than he would be of bright light; 
 but it is because there are other things on his mind than just the inert 
 passive darkness. And this interpretation is corroborated (3) by the 
 fact that, other things being equal, decrease in sensation does tend toward 
 unconsciousness. And even the precautions we take in our sleeping 
 arrangements testify to this tendency for decrease in sensation to be 
 accompanied by diminished consciousness. We conclude, therefore, that 
 the claim that we can be just as vividly aware of a less intense stimulation 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 75 
 
 would not offer any real support to the Bergsonian view that there is no 
 intensive magnitude in conscious experience. 
 
 His own way of stating the point at issue is on the whole a very satis- 
 factory one. In discussing supposed intensive magnitude in the feeling 
 of pressure he suggests that we "examine whether this increase of sensa- 
 tion ought not rather to be called a sensation of increase."'*^ Perhaps 
 that is a better way to describe the fact tliat I am conscious of greater 
 muscular tension or a brighter light or louder sound. But would not the 
 same improvement in terminology fit also the attribute of quality which, 
 as a feature of conscious states, he admits so freely and rests so much 
 upon? Suppose we examine whether a quality of sensation ought not 
 rather to be called a sensation of quality, as for instance of red. As was 
 seen above it is a fairly difficult task to say in just what sense the "red" 
 characterizes the fact of perception and, rather than make the perception 
 of red a red perception, it would be better to revise our general formula in 
 just the way he suggests we modify our notion of intensive magnitude 
 (increase and decrease). And yet our author insists that quahty is an 
 ultimate attribute of sensation, while intensive magnitude is not. 
 
 And the strongest consideration of all against the "new way of ideas" 
 that we are here discussing is just this: As a matter of fact we do have the 
 idea of intensive magnitude. Where did we get it? Suppose we grant 
 his contention that when we speak of intensity in the old sense we are 
 really mistaking greater qualitative complexity or multiplicity for magni- 
 tude; what is the analogy on which our mistake is based? The native of 
 tropical Africa is not liable to mistake salt for snow when he has never 
 seen any snow. How can a person mistake something for something else 
 when that something else is "sui generis" and has never entered into his 
 experience at all? The idea of intensive magnitude that we do possess 
 (1) is not simply consciousness spatialized. To say that one light is 
 brighter than another is precisely and explicitly to refer to an attribute 
 that is other than spatial. A square yard of snow surface in light of con- 
 stant illumination is in no way to be confused with a square foot that is 
 nine times as bright. The difference we intend, rightly or wrongly, in 
 the idea of intensive magnitude cannot possibly be reduced to terms of 
 space. And if, then, (2) we resort to the notion of qualitative complexity, 
 we still assert an error that, as an error, it is impossible to account for. 
 That is, we may grant that, in any particular case you may choose, we 
 have mistaken simple qualitative complexity for intensive magnitude; 
 
 " Time and Free Will, p. 41. 
 
76 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 but this could not be true in all cases without removing all distinguishing 
 content from the idea of intensity as something different; in which case, 
 by the way, there has never really been any error at all. To repeat, we 
 have the idea of intensive magnitude. If, upon closer inspection, it is 
 exactly the same as the idea of complexity, then we have the author's 
 authority for applying it to conscious states (it could make no difference 
 which of two synonyms one made use of); and if the idea of intensive 
 magnitude cannot be reduced to these other ideas as elements, then I 
 submit that intensive magnitude must somewhere be a fact in experience, 
 otherwise the idea could never arise. The very existence of the illusion 
 testifies to the existence somewhere of the fact! 
 
 But next let us grant for the sake of argument that, when a conscious 
 state seems to have greater intensive magnitude, the real fact is only that 
 more and more conscious elements have been affected, — that "little by 
 little it permeates a larger number of psychic elements, tinging them, so 
 to speak, with its own color. "^'' This very retreat has its dangers, for 
 the idea of number has a desperately quantitative ring about it. This 
 difficulty Professor Bergson meets by a fairly heroic effort. There are 
 two types of multipUcity, — one that is homogeneous and discrete as 
 magnitude, and another type that is heterogeneous and of which the 
 parts, instead of being other and discrete, are fluid and permeate each 
 other. "Our conclusion, therefore, is that there are two kinds of multi- 
 plicity; that of material objects, to which the conception of number is 
 immediately applicable; and the multipUcity of states of consciousness, 
 which cannot be regarded as numerical without the help of some symbolic 
 representation in which a necessary element is space. "^^ Indeed it is 
 everywhere insisted that number as discrete magnitude is directly a 
 function of space and that, therefore, it cannot apply to consciousness 
 itself. But I think it may be fairly questioned that number magnitude 
 in all forms can properly be eliminated from consciousness. Take for 
 example his account of differences in the feelings of effort. "Our con- 
 sciousness of an increase of muscular effort is reducible to the twofold 
 perception of a greater number of peripheral sensations, and of a qualita- 
 tive change occurring in some of them. "^^ Thus in order to escape the 
 notion of magnitude included in the ordinary idea of intensity, recourse 
 is had to the conception of complexity, — of an organization of a greater 
 number of conscious elements, though number is of the very essence of 
 
 8» Ihid., p. 8. 
 »' Ibid.,p. 87. 
 «« Ibid., p. 26. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 77 
 
 magnitude. To be sure, the sensations are really organized; they are not 
 left distinct like grains of sand ; but if they be not completely distinct they 
 are at least distinguished to just the extent to which they can be regarded 
 as "many," and this manyness is not a negligible feature of the situation 
 but the very thing Professor Bergson relies upon to escape the admission 
 of intensive magnitude. And this same explanation is given of many 
 typical examples of apparent conscious intensity. "We shall easily 
 understand this process if, for example, we hold a pin in our right hand 
 and prick our left hand more and more deeply. At first we shall feel as it 
 were a tickling, then a touch which is succeeded by a prick, then a pain 
 localized at a point, and finally the spreading of this pain over the sur- 
 rounding zone. And the more we reflect on it, the more clearly shall we 
 see that we are here dealing with so many quahtatively distinct sensa- 
 tions, so many varieties of a single species. But yet we spoke at first of 
 one and the same sensation which spread further and further, of one 
 prick which increased in intensity. The reason is that, without noticing 
 it, we localized in the sensation of the left hand, which is pricked, the 
 progressive effort of the right hand, which pricks. We thus introduced 
 the cause into the effect, and unconsciously interpreted quality as quan- 
 tity, intensity as magnitude. Now it is easy to see that the intensity of 
 every representative sensation ought to be understood in the same way. "^^ 
 To be sure, it is pointed out at great length that the multipUcity here 
 demanded in order to explain our seeming consciousness of magnitude is 
 one of a very unique sort. It is not the plurality of spatial counting. 
 Thus "pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of quaHtative 
 changes, which melt into and permeate each other, without precise out- 
 lines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one 
 another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure hetero- 
 geneity."^*' But would a multiplicity without any affiliation with num- 
 ber be real multiplicity at all? In this connection the purpose is not to 
 point out a mere contradiction in his use of the word "number." W> 
 are quite aware that he deliberately uses the word in two senses. At the 
 very beginning of his chapter on multiplicity he speaks, in a footnote, of 
 the "vital distinction between the multiplicity of juxta- 
 position and that of interpenetration which it is the 
 
 chief aim of the present chapter to establish. "^^ The only question is, 
 Does he estabhsh it? Granted that conscious states melt into and 
 
 " Ibid., pp. 42, 43. 
 »° Ibid., pp. 104-105. 
 " IbU., p. 75. 
 
78 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 permeate each other without definite outHnes, still can there be multi- 
 plicity that is totally without reference to number? If the states com- 
 pletely permeated each other we would have simply one new state in 
 place of the old ones. But, as we saw above, some trace of their plurality 
 or distinctness must be left in order to account for the illusion of intensive 
 magnitude, which is itself only an incorrect reading of this very multi- 
 plicity. And in such a case it is futile to insist that it is a "quaUtative 
 multiplicity with no likeness to number. "^^ 
 
 Or again, if it is literally true that "thus in consciousness we find 
 states which succeed, without being distinguished from one another,"^' 
 where does the notion of multiplicity come in at all? There must be 
 some difference distinguishing moments otherwise we could not even 
 "string them out" in space, however unfortunate such a stringing out 
 may be. If the notes of a tune really melt together and completely 
 permeate each other, then why, as Mr. BalsiUie asks, would it not be 
 better to hear them all together, simultaneously? As a matter of neces- 
 sity they must somehow (let us grant qualitatively) be distinguished, and 
 iust to that degree they are numerable if one choose to count them. 
 
 Without pushing the matter any further the writer, at least, is forced 
 to conclude (1) that while there may indeed be degrees (another quanti- 
 tative term!) of distinctness in the separateness of conscious elements, 
 there certainly is no proof of a multipHcity that involves no magnitude 
 at all. And (2) that if one hold that conscious states (for instance the 
 perception of red) have intensity in the same sense in which they have 
 quaUty (i. e., in this case the redness itself) then, even apart from the 
 question of the two kinds of multiplicity, their intensive magnitude has 
 not been disproved. 
 
 With this in mind we must turn now to his definite claim that time, 
 considered as quantitative, is identical with space. As is evident from 
 the discussion at the beginning of the paper, the writer is as Httle disposed 
 as any one else to make time an outer medium in which experience exists. 
 But neither need space be made an outer fact. Professor Bergson holds, 
 along with the general run of idealists, that space is a product of mental 
 activity and that without the latter there would be no such thing as space 
 in existence. ^^ All parties to the discussion seem also convinced that the 
 quantitative time relations of the facts of experience are, too, the product 
 of consciousness. The question, however, that we mean next to discuss 
 
 ^2 Ihid., p. 226. 
 »' Ibid., p. 227. 
 »^ Ibid., pp. 92-97. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 79 
 
 is whether this quantitative time is identical with space, — that being the 
 ruhng conception in Professor Bergson's view. The body of modern 
 opinion is that time is a relation of magnitude even though it be not a 
 metaphysical entity, and the burden of proof must rest on the side of the 
 new interpretation. And the claim here made is that time and space are 
 sufficiently and even characteristically distinguished, simply from the 
 standpoint of the observer, as different quantitative relationships in the 
 field of phenomena, — that one is as dependent on consciousness as the 
 other even if they do not enjoy equal universality of application. 
 
 Having, to his own satisfaction, proved that consciousness itself 
 contains no trace of magnitude, our author regards time magnitude as 
 well as number magnitude as really determinations of space. They have 
 been reduced to this by a process of elimination, — the process, namely, of 
 having been shut out from the inner realm, and all outer quantity is held 
 to be the same. Thus, "If space is to be defined as the homogeneous, it 
 seems inversely that every homogeneous and unbounded medium will be 
 space. For, homogeneity here consisting in the absence of every quality, 
 it is hard to see how two forms of the homogeneous could be distinguished 
 from one another. "^^ Of course, if space is to be defined as the homo- 
 geneous! This begs the whole question. It is almost equal to saying 
 that if all quantity is spatial it is all space. The very question is whether 
 there is not more than one quantitative relationship established by con- 
 sciousness. The word "homogeneous," by the way, is used throughout 
 as equivalent to quantity. As his discussion of Kant and his agreement 
 with him so far as space is concerned go to show, he does not regard even 
 space as an empty ontological "room" for things but rather as a law — 
 and therefore a homogeneous element — in consciousness. The point, 
 then, assumed in the premise of his argument, is simply that we cannot 
 consistently have two types of the quantitative in consciousness. One 
 must be thrown out as " spurious, "^*' at least in so far as it is quantitative. 
 And in this case, of course, it is time that must go, since space is conceded 
 in the very definition of magnitude. Perhaps the best way to answer 
 ''uch an argument is to reverse its application. Time or duration in 
 consciousness is simply and only qualitative, and so quality is really time 
 and all qualitative distinctions claiming to be other than temporal are 
 ultimately "spurious"! Of course, the latter conclusion is not a valid 
 one, but neither is the other precisely similar argument. Space is homo- 
 geneous simply in the sense that, as a general law, it may be abstracted 
 
 «5 Ibid., p. 98. 
 »« Ibid., p. 98, 
 
80 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 from the matter of experience to which it is applied and so all differentia 
 of specific cases be regarded as independent of it. And to say that it is 
 "the homogeneous" would, from such a point of view, be identifying it 
 with all law in general, which I suppose no one cares to do. And if its 
 homogeneity be understood as that of the general law applicable to many 
 things but, as a law, independent of the specific features of any particular 
 case (and Professor Bergson claims to follow Kant in holding this view)" 
 then there seems to be no goodreason why there should not be other laws 
 having the same possibility of abstraction and relating the facts of experi- 
 ence in another quantitative way. Such a law ideahsts have held time 
 to be. 
 
 Another difficulty arises with regard to the notion of number. Kant 
 held that number is the science of time as geometry of space. Now while 
 it is doubtless at present impossible to make such a clear-cut distinction, 
 still the question remains. Is it possible, with Professor Bergson, to regard 
 number as wholly a determination of space? Since real time exists only 
 in a qualitative realm which "has no relation to number," it is obvious 
 that Professor Bergson must logically base the fact of number entirely on 
 that of space. Even counting must be rescued from time. This is how 
 he does it: "It is true that we count successive moments of duration, and 
 that, because of its relations with number, time at first seems to us to be 
 a measurable magnitude, just hke space. But there is here an important 
 distinction to be made. I say, e. g., that a minute has just elapsed, and I 
 mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed sixty 
 oscillations. If I picture these sixty oscillations to myself all at once by 
 a single mental perception, I exclude by h3^othesis the idea of a succes- 
 sion. I do not think of sixty strokes which succeed one another, but of 
 sixty points on a fixed line, each of which symbolizes, so to speak, an 
 oscillation of the pendulum. If, on the other hand, I wish to picture 
 these sixty oscillations in succession, but without altering the way they 
 are produced in space, I shall be compelled to think of each oscillation to 
 the exclusion of the recollection of the preceding one, for space has pre- 
 served no trace of it; but by doing so I shall condemn myseK to remain 
 forever in the present; I shall give up the attempt to think of a succession 
 or a duration. "^^ 
 
 That is, in order to count sixty and have any clear conception of what 
 it means, I must spread the whole sLxty out in space and actually "picture 
 
 " Ibid., p. 94. 
 
 " Ibid., pp. 104-105. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 81 
 
 these sixty oscillations to myself all at once by a single mental percep- 
 tion!" But certainly such an amazing scope of attention is hopelessly 
 beyond our reach. According to Professor Wundt, eight is the maximum 
 plurality of which we can be distinctly conscious in any single act of 
 attention. In which case we seem to face the perfectly simple alternative : 
 Either counting is, at least in part, a time function, which introduces the 
 element of numerical quantity into succession, or else our real mathe- 
 matics is limited to a number scale of eight units only, all higher numbers 
 being purely symbolic like i/If. The truth of the first alternative would 
 seriously disfigure the general scheme of Professor Bergson's theory; the 
 second would be somewhat of a handicap for the rest of the world. 
 
 But our author is in most cases wiUing enough to follow out his ideas 
 to their most extreme consequences. For instance, if time is not quanti- 
 tative at all and if all magnitude is space, then not time nor even motion, 
 but only space, is measurable. This conclusion, too, is definitely drawn 
 and insisted upon. When we set out to measure motion or velocity, it 
 only means that "we are to note the exact moment at which the motion 
 begins, i. e., the coincidence of an external change with one of our psychic 
 states; we are to note the moment at which the motion ends, that is to 
 say, another simultaneity ; finally we are to measure the space traversed, 
 the only thing, in fact, which is really measurable. Hence there is no 
 question here of duration, but only of space and simultaneities."^^ But 
 does this ingenious method really eliminate the "t" from the mathemati- 
 cal notion of velocity ds/^dt, or take away its quantitative character, 
 which is the same thing, since mathematics truly enough knows no quali- 
 tative differences? In the first place we must notice a vestige of the 
 older, quantitative conception in the fixing of "simultaneities." To be 
 aware that various things are in the same plane in space, for instance, is 
 to localize them just as truly as to show that they were in different planes. 
 More than that; to show that they are all in this plane of two dimensions 
 means that we have calculated their position primarily with reference to 
 the other, the third, dimension which as a matter of statement does not 
 seem to be a part of the plane at all. The plane could not be defined 
 apart from the fact that it extends zero distance in one certain direction. 
 And in a precisely similar way, it is measuring their time locus just as 
 truly to say that two events are simultaneous as to say that they are so 
 far apart in the time series. A moment without duration at all, an abso- 
 lute simultaneity, is at the same time a determination made with refer- 
 
 '* Ibid., pp. 115-116. 
 
82 SOME VIEWS OE THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 ence to length of duration just as a geometrical plane receives its character 
 as two-dimensional precisely through its relation to that third dimension 
 which it does not include. To appeal to simultaneities is not, therefore, 
 to escape the necessity of regarding time as quantitative or measurable; 
 rather it is to assert it. 
 
 And even apart from a discussion of his explanation by simultaneities, 
 we might well have a priori misgivings with regard to any method that 
 professed to know velocity without measuring time. The simple formula 
 ds/dt must remain a constant reminder that something is left out in 
 such an attempt. If we accept all of Professor Bergson's conclusions, we 
 are, of course, compelled to regard the"t"hereas a spurious form of "s" 
 in which case the expression for velocity reduces to ds/fds , — that is, it is 
 defined with reference to space alone and so becomes identical with dis- 
 tance. But that is not velocity at all in any sense of the word ! Or else 
 the "t" is purely qualitative,^"'' in which case differential "t" becomes a 
 very rare specimen of absurdity, as does also all mathematics that pro- 
 fesses to deal with it. And indeed something not unlike this is definitely 
 taught in the idea that real motion is qualitative and so beyond direct 
 scientific apprehension. But yet it is insisted that in some incompre- 
 hensible manner^"^ mathematics is able to calculate future simultaneities 
 through the very use of this "t" as quantitative. If true, it is certainly 
 a most noteworthy fact that a concept known to be wholly and radically 
 false should at the same time yield conclusions that are universally true. 
 
 It is perhaps unprofessional and more or less an "argumentum ad 
 populum" to point out a lack of harmony between a technical conclusion 
 and the views of common sense, but the requirements of a view that time 
 is not measurable offer unusual temptations to such a procedure. All 
 reference to a time as long or short is, in the last analysis, utterly unper- 
 missible. We cannot speak of more or less time in any sense because that 
 is to introduce the idea of magnitude again. Many seemingly grotesque 
 conclusions result in this way from a consistent denial of the quantitative 
 character of time, but under the circumstances we must resist their allure- 
 ments. Suffice only to notice how such a denial reduces the ordinary 
 suppositions of common sense to hopeless raving and flatly contradicts 
 the data of all simple introspection. 
 
 But to get back to his explicit arguments, we must notice one more 
 consideration that is found again and again in Professor Bergson's writings. 
 The mind can construe only simultaneities. It tries to understand the 
 
 i»o Cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 246-259. 
 "' Time and Free Will, p. 227. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 83 
 
 flow of time as a. sum of these just as it tries to construe motion as a 
 succession of positions, i. e., of stops. Everyone is familiar with his 
 famous cinematograph metaphor. The mind sees the reahty of nature 
 in the form of images which are always cross-sections and contain in 
 themselves no movement or action. As simultaneities they represen 
 space and not time. Therefore, once more, space is the fact knowable by 
 intelUgence, conceptual time is only space, and real duration turns out to 
 be unrepresentable. The paradoxes of Zeno are thus the direct result of 
 this tendency to see time as a succession of simultaneities and motion as 
 a succession of stops,^"- whereas both are continuous and so irreducible 
 even to an infinite number of mere cross-sections. But it is certainly 
 difficult to see how time and space are to be so distinguished. Of course, 
 time is not a succession of simultaneities nor motion of stops. But then, 
 neither is space a summation of planes. Neither space nor time, that is 
 to say, is a sum of zeros, as our differential expressions when pushed to the 
 limit seem to indicate. And if we admit that the differential analysis 
 only implies their infinite divisibility, and therefore their continuous 
 character, the fact remains that both space and time are subject to the 
 same interpretation and so no basis is afforded for relating them in such 
 utterly different ways to consciousness. The parts of space are not 
 separated from each other by definite boundaries chiefly, I suppose, 
 because space is not an addition of separate parts. Considered as a law 
 of mental synthesis either space or time is infinitely divisible in that one 
 would never reach a point where he could not apply his analyzing any 
 further; considered as embodied in concrete experience, neither is divisible 
 beyond a certain minimum discernible. There is no basis for a distinction 
 on this score. 
 
 This point is well illustrated in the case of motion which, though 
 there be " nothing in common between quality and quantity, " seems to be 
 very intimately related to both space and time. As a matter of fact, as 
 we saw above, Professor Bergson puts motion on the side of time as a 
 continuous quality and therefore unrepresentable by the intellect. But 
 motion is equally a function of space and time, and it is obvious enough 
 that it cannot be a continuous function with reference to one of them and 
 discontinuous with reference to the other, — ^^at least if uniform motion is 
 possible, and I am incUned to think that the same consideration would 
 hold for all cases. At any rate the one case is enough for our present 
 argument. 
 
 "2 Matter and Memory, p. 252. 
 
84 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 For the reasons above briefly outlined we are unable to accept his 
 conclusions (a) that quantitative time is really space, (b) that therefore, 
 regarded as coordinate, space and time cannot be characteristically dis- 
 tinguished, and finally (c) that the reality of time must therefore be 
 sought in some altogether different sphere. On the contrary, we are 
 still inclined to insist that space and time are both constitutive relation- 
 ships in experience, that both owe their very existence to the relating 
 activity that functions there, and that therefore, in the last analysis, the 
 consciousness that establishes these relationships is in its existence time- 
 less. And the suspicion that we have harbored in all the above discus- 
 sion, and which, in conclusion, we shall seek to justify is this: The con- 
 ceptual time that Professor Bergson dismisses as a spurious idea because 
 it is quantitative, is approximately what the so-called absolutist regards 
 as the characteristic time synthesis in phenomena, and that the pure 
 duration that is not measurable or quantitative in any sense and is thus 
 so thoroughly distinguished from conceptual time, possesses a remarkable 
 similarity to what others have regarded as timelessness. This comparison 
 will be elaborated by pointing out a number of ways in which his particu- 
 lar arguments and conclusions with respect to this pure duration resemble 
 the arguments and conclusions which ordinarily, and particularly in the 
 work of Professor Eucken, pertain primarily to a timeless order. 
 
 Consider for a moment his argument that a pure, qualitative time is 
 necessary to account for the continuity of sense perception and, as closely 
 allied with this, the phenomena of memory. The facts are these: The 
 process of perception is, physically (i. e., spatially) considered, a well 
 nigh infinite plurality. When we see a red color it means that approxi- 
 mately 400 bilUon separate and distinct light waves impinge upon our 
 retina. Considered from the standpoint of measurable time, every 
 individual wave has its particular date in the series to the exclusion of 
 every other. And yet we do not experience the now of each of these 
 impacts separately but countless miUions of them fuse together to give 
 one conscious visual percept. And the only way to explain this collective 
 immediacy is to suppose that somehow consciousness is not squeezed into 
 the narrow confines of the mathematical present but transcends the 
 series at least to the degree that it is concretely present to a plurality of 
 successive elements. Now this very point is insisted upon in Matter and 
 Memory, ^^^ except that there "length of rhythm" is the name given to 
 what others might call degree of transcendence or time-span. Indeed he 
 
 103 p. 272 ff. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 85 
 
 even follows Professor Royce in concluding that there might be beings of 
 immensely wider "rhythm" who would take in whole millenniums of 
 time in a single glance. And on the other hand, of course, the quantita- 
 tive time of physical succession whose present is the mathematical limit 
 of an infinite converging series, is only conceptual time, i. e., ultimately, 
 space. And the property of consciousness by which it is able to be 
 immediately present to a vast number of these simple "nows" and fuse 
 them all together in one percept, is real time, pure duration. Exactly 
 the same argument is used on both sides to prove exactly the same thing 
 and they can be made almost interchangeable by simply reversing the 
 terms "transcendence" and "pure duration." It is obviously a matter 
 of rhetoric only which we shall use. 
 
 Similarly in the phenomena of mental reproduction. Suppose I look 
 at a field of snow from the comfortable vantage ground of a steam heated 
 room. Although I feel no present sensations of cold, and although, on 
 the other hand, coldness is not to be regarded as a visual element, still I 
 seem to see that it is cold outside, — the snow "looks" cold. The simple 
 fact seems to be that the contents of past experience may be in a strange 
 but real way embodied in the present percept. In fact, without such 
 relationship to the past it is not difficult to show that the sensation of the 
 present instant would be quite unintelligible. This is the heart of truth 
 in the contentions of the Medieval Realists and has in the last century 
 been elaborately treated in the writings of T. H. Green. And for sake of 
 brevity we may couple with this fact of perception the closely related 
 fact of memory. (Professor Bergson insists that the former is never 
 found without the latter anyhow.) When, for example, I remember how 
 cold the snow was on a certain definite past instance, I only make explicit 
 what was implicit in the above-mentioned visual perception of "cold 
 snow." The memory image, as an image, is present in the actual and 
 only sense of the word and yet I am conscious of it as a past, not a present, 
 fact that now presents itself to me. The physical disturbance in the 
 brain is a present event and, as definitely related in an order of succession, 
 so is the mental image itself. But somehow its home, its proper element, 
 is the past; it embodies in its own immediate content a part of a vanished 
 world. And Professor Bergson is unquestionably right in insisting that, 
 from the standpoint of the mutual externality of the moments of suc- 
 cession, such a living past is beyond accounting for.^°^ But the point we 
 want to urge here is simply. Why call this capacity of consciousness to 
 
 '"^ Matter and Memory, pp. 85-105. 
 
86 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 deal with what lies beyond the present fleeting moment "real duration"? 
 Why not better call it some sort of transcendence of the time series? In 
 Mind for 1909 Mr. A. R. Whately discusses exactly the same point and 
 from the very same arguments concludes that "the principle of separa- 
 tion lies on the side of the temporal self, the principle of unity on that of 
 the eternal," which is a "doctrine of the immanence of the ego in its 
 states and yet of transcendence."^"^ This latter termi- 
 nology is the one current at present, but it is obviously essentially the 
 same conception of consciousness as that which Professor Bergson sets 
 forth in such a new garb. And where the conceptions are not materially 
 altered, it is certainly better in the interests of lucidity if nothing else, to 
 continue to use terms in the same way. 
 
 This relationship of consciousness to memory is closely connected 
 with another favorite fact of those who hold views analogous to the 
 Kantian. Perhaps indeed it is only stating the same fact in converse 
 form. Just so far as consciousness is immediately in touch with past and 
 future (however narrow its horizon may be) to that extent we may say 
 that its "present" is not the mere point dividing past and future, but 
 transcends it. The consciousness of the present moment carries a heavy 
 ballast of expectation and memory and these to a large degree make the 
 present what it is. So runs the traditional description. Let us now 
 compare the accounts given by the two men whose views of time are 
 ostensibly so antithetical. Professor Bergson says, "Pure duration is 
 the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our 
 ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from 
 its former states. For this purpose it need not be entirely absorbed in 
 the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer 
 endure. Nor need it forget its former states; it is enough that, in recalling 
 these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point 
 alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into an 
 organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so 
 to speak, into one another, "i"" Compare with this the following from 
 Professor Eucken: "Die Vergangenheit ist dann nicht mehr eine blosse 
 Vergangenheit, sie kann ein Stiick einer zeitliberlegenen Gegenwart 
 werden und damit eine Sache eignen Lebens, unablassiger Arbeit blei- 
 ben."^°^ And such parallelism of statements on both sides might be 
 
 "5 A. R. Whately, The Higher Unmediacy, Mind for 1909, p. 373. Cf. also, Eucken, 
 Geist. Strom., bottom of p. 270. 
 '"" Time and Free Will, p. 100. 
 "' Geist. Strom., p. 269. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 87 
 
 indefinitely mulliplied. For both authors the being of consciousness 
 vastly transcends the present instant; the chief distinction between the 
 two is that one calls it "transcendence" while the other does not. 
 
 In another place several paragraphs have been devoted to showing 
 that time, succession, as a relationship in which phenomena stand, is 
 meaningless apart from the activity of intelligence. That is, time 
 relationships are so much and so characteristically the work of conscious- 
 ness that any reality, to be so related, must be thought of as present to 
 some consciousness. And this is, in principle, no new contention. It is 
 at least as old as the Critique of Pure Reason. And now let us compare 
 that particular idea with the corresponding feature of the new philosophy. 
 "What duration is there existing outside us? The present only, or, if we 
 prefer the expression, simultaneity. No doubt external things change, 
 but their moments do not succeed one another, if we retain the ordinary 
 meaning of the word, except for a consciousness which keeps them in 
 mind. "^"^ That again is certainly not a radical alteration of fundamental 
 conceptions but chiefly an interchange of words with ordinary idealism. 
 Kant held that time relations (those of before and after, succession, etc.) 
 are established in the "synthetic unity of apperception " and if we choose 
 to simplify the statement by saying that they are the work of the knowing 
 consciousness, the essential principle is the same. And in this argument 
 Professor Bergson shows that the time relations of "phenomena" are 
 founded upon the superior reality of consciousness but adds that, for 
 that reason, it is not really time, but space, that appears there. He 
 shows that the existence of consciousness is assumed by, and is therefore 
 logically prior to, the fact of temporal succession, but insists that in that 
 account consciousness only really endures. Why not, then, apply the 
 same process to the idea of space? As was noticed above, he holds that 
 space is the product of mental activity. Take that away, then, and 
 there would be no spatial relationships at all. Then why not say that 
 objective space is really only conceptual space and that "pure" extension 
 is only to be found in the mind? The reason here is ob^'ious enough. 
 To be the ground of the very reality of space the mind could not, without 
 a hopeless circle in reasoning, be regarded as spatial in its own existence, 
 and the word "space" is too closely associated with the actual space 
 relationships of phenomena for it ever to be used as meaning really the 
 transcendent ground on which these relationships depend. But because 
 the very fact of time has less concreteness and more ambiguity and mys- 
 
 '«« Time atid Free Will, p. 227. 
 
OO SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 tery about it, it is possible to use the word in these two very different 
 ways. 
 
 And before leaving this feature of the subject it would be well to point 
 out the close analogy of the above idealistic argument of Professor Berg- 
 son with the same much-quoted argument of Professor Eucken. The 
 relationship of succession in the world of facts which the former calls 
 conceptual time is exactly what the latter describes as the "nachein- 
 ander" of the parts of time; and the "real duration" in the conscious self 
 by which the very series of succession is explained by Professor Bergson, 
 is in this sense identical with "das iiberlegende Geistesleben " which for 
 Professor Eucken makes the synthesis of this hopeless multiplicity possi- 
 ble. The chief difference is that the characteristic that one philosopher 
 calls "real" time the other labels "timeless." 
 
 Every reader of philosophy is familiar with the metaphor of the "man 
 on the bank" who only can know the flow of the stream. One does not 
 see any movement when he is being carried by an ocean current precisely 
 because he himself moves along with everything. And so we have often 
 heard it contended that, in order for us to know the succession of moments 
 as a succession, the standpoint from which consciousness surveys it must 
 be to some degree independent of the flow. In Time and Free Will we 
 find this venerable (and certainly valid) argument in the following dis- 
 guise: "Let us imagine a straight Hne of unlimited length, and on this 
 line a material point ' A ' which moves. If this point were conscious of 
 itself, it would feel itself change, since it moves; it would perceive a 
 succession; but would this succession assume for it the form of a line? 
 No doubt it would, if it could rise, so to speak, above the line which it 
 traverses, and perceive simultaneously several points of it in juxtaposi- 
 tion: but by doing so it would form the idea of space, and it is in space 
 and not in pure duration that it would see displayed the changes which 
 it undergoes. "^"^ If one keep it constantly in mind that, with Professor 
 Bergson, quantitative time is space and "real time" contains no relation- 
 ships of measurable time at all, it is evident that in his argument here 
 quoted we have a new edition of exactly the same line of reasoning that 
 many "absolutists" use to show the transcendence of the time flow by 
 the self that knows it, — and, we might add, to the extent to which it 
 knows it. The purpose here, of course, is not to discuss the validity of 
 either argument or both but only to point out the similarity that under- 
 lies the outer contrast in their terms. 
 
 '"9 Time and Free Will, pp. 102-103. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 89 
 
 And along this line, too, it is impossible to keep from mentioning the 
 striking similarity between Professor Bergson and Professor Royce^^" in 
 their treatment of the "specious present. " That we should, in one grasp 
 of perception, be aware of a whole series of events that, considered from 
 the standpoint of their before-and-after, are quite distinct, is at first 
 sight a startling paradox, — even if it does turn out upon reflection that 
 without such an inclusive survey we could never be conscious of succes- 
 sion at all. In "The World and the Individual" this seeming paradox is 
 beautifully illustrated by reference to our consciousness of a musical 
 phrase or melody. The very condition of its being a melody is that we 
 should hold the successive notes apart in time and yet the primary condi- 
 tion of our knowing it as a melody is that we should be conscious of its 
 movement as a whole. And it is a question of the range of consciousness 
 simply (not of the events as a series) whether we will be conscious of a 
 minute or million years in this direct and immediate way. And now, 
 oddly enough, this very figure of speech that is so prominent in Professor 
 Royce's discussion of time, is the identical one in terms of which the 
 French Professor likes best to explain and enforce his own view.^^^ This 
 would not be surprising in the least were it not for the fact that the two 
 writers seem to hold such opposing views, the one insisting that even the 
 human consciousness is in its small way an expression of the Eternal, and 
 the other that consciousness alone possesses real duration. And con- 
 versely, if we find that "pure duration" is related to the plurality of 
 succeeding moments in precisely the same way in which "Eternity" is 
 related to it, we cannot well escape the suspicion that the Eternity and 
 pure duration here in question have very much in common. 
 
 But that is a digression. In other respects the thought of Professor 
 Bergson only slightly resembles that of Professor Royce. In his opposi- 
 tion to rationalism of all sorts he is much more closely related to Professor 
 Eucken, and to the more explicit comparison of these two we must now 
 return. 
 
 It was pointed out at length in our foregoing discussion of the Jena 
 philosopher that the Geistesleben of his view is not equally concerned with 
 all events in time nor equally present in all individuals. It is only in the 
 crises that the Eternal comes explicitly into view, whether we refer to 
 the crises in the life of a man or the history of a nation. The great world 
 of Truth and Life is always there, always real; but much of the time we 
 
 "'» The World and the Individual, Vol. ii, Ch. 3. 
 
 >" Time and Free Will, pp. 100, 105, 111, 123, 127, etc. 
 
90 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 live in a mechanical way, oblivious to wider relationships. We walk 
 with our eyes fixed on the ground, and forget the sun that makes our very 
 perception of it possible.^^^ The point of interest now is to see how this 
 feature, too, of the Geistesleben is paralleled in the Bergsonian world of 
 pure duration. The self that is not in quantitative (conceptual) time is 
 by no means always prominent in human experience and conduct. We 
 are occasionally aware of the deeper self, "but the moments at which we 
 thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free. ""' 
 "It is at the great and solemn crisis, decisive of our reputation with 
 others, and yet more with ourselves, that we choose in defiance of what is 
 conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible reason 
 is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes."^^^ Thus free and 
 independent personality turns out to be a possibility rather than a gift; 
 one's transcendence of the changing, mechanical details of his general 
 experience is a function of the spiritual earnestness of his dealings with 
 life and the breadth of vision he may attain. " Wie weit aber das Leben 
 sie uberwindet und eine iiberzeitliche Gegenwart erreicht, das hangt vor 
 allem an der geistigen Kraft, die es aufzubieten vermag; bei uns selbst 
 steht es schliesslich, ob der Schwerpunkt unseres Seins ins Vergangliche 
 oder ins Unvergangliche fallt."^^^ 
 
 And in both, also, is this intervention of the higher principle of a more 
 or less nonrational type. The great objection that Professor Eucken 
 urges against the absolute idealism of the Hegelian type is just that it 
 tries to substitute "Wissen" for "Leben," — that it dissipates the con- 
 crete into a mere shadow realm of formal ideas. It is a "transformation 
 of the whole of reality into a tissue of logical relations. And this neces- 
 sarily destroys the immediacy of life in all its forms. It banishes all 
 psychical inwardness and at the same time all spiritual content. ""^ The 
 
 "mere manipulation of concepts is like turning a screw 
 
 in a vacuum where it meets with no resistance. "^^'^ The philosophy of 
 the Geistesleben is no mere intellectualism. The Absolute is not a Neo- 
 Platonic pyramid of concepts, but an inner spiritual power. For Profes- 
 sor Bergson, similarly, the real self beneath the formal crust is something 
 radically different than a logic machine. Indeed, as we saw above, it is 
 
 "^ Cf. Hauptprobleme, p. 26, and Geist. Strom., p. 266. 
 
 "3 Time and Free Will, p. 231. 
 
 ''*Ibid.,p. 170. 
 
 "" Geist. Stom. p. 271. 
 
 "* Problem of Human Life, p. 502. 
 
 >" Ibid., p. 503. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 91 
 
 at once the service and the danger of intellect that it does represent Life 
 in the form of concepts. To know the "elan vital" as it really is one 
 must turn back to the simple immediacy of feeling, something roughly 
 resembling, perhaps, the experience that accompanies instinct at its 
 best."* And accordingly when this mystic power that knows no explana- 
 tion in words and concepts (and "there is no common measure between 
 mind and language" since the latter is incurably infected with the exter- 
 nalities of space)— when this power does rise, now and then, into active 
 domination, it is equally without rational or logical ado. On frequent 
 important occasions "we wish to know the reason why we have made up 
 our mind, and we find that we have decided without any reason, and 
 perhaps even against every reason. But, in certain cases, that is the best 
 
 of reasons and this absence of any tangible reason is the 
 
 more striking the deeper our freedom goes. ""^ Thus in both systems of 
 thought the back-lying world of Power carries ideas, concepts, reason- 
 ings, on its surface, but only there; its inner reality is not a structure of 
 Reason. 
 
 And with this retreat to inner immediacy and intuition, it is not 
 strange that both should find a significant expression of this ultimate 
 Life in the creativeness of artistic production. Indeed, for the German, 
 art may even be an indispensible means to the real unfolding of life. 
 Referring to "der nordische Mensch" he says: "so bleibt ihm leicht das 
 •Innerste der Seele unausgesprochen und seine eigne Tiefe verschlossen. 
 Daher wird ihm die Kunst ein unentbehrliches jSIittel, sich selbst zu 
 finden, sein Eigentum in vollen Besitz zu nehmen, die Kluft im eignen 
 Wesen irgend zu schliessen. "^^o ^nd in a very similar vein writes Pro- 
 fessor Bergson: "The intention of life, the simple movement that runs 
 through the lines, that binds them together and gives them significance, 
 
 escapes it (intellectual perception) This intention is just 
 
 what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the object 
 by a kind of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the 
 
 barrier that space puts up between him and his model. "^-^ 
 
 "Art lives on creation and implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of 
 nature. "122 
 
 "* Creative Evolution, p. 176. 
 »9 Ti7ne attd Free Will, p. 170. 
 '20 Geist. Strom., p. 341, top. 
 1" Creative Evolution, p. 177. 
 '22 Ibid., p. 45. 
 
92 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 In short, for both our philosophers, the great and underlying Reality 
 that finds expression in all conative thought and action, in all originality 
 and independence, all striving and progress, is a Life that does not fall 
 apart into the multiplicity of successive moments of measurable time but 
 owns instead an intimate inner organization. Oddly enough both men 
 have been accused by reviewers of falling into a dualism by failing to show 
 sufficient connection between the outer temporal process and this inner 
 higher being.^^^ It can be no accident that two conceptions, though they 
 have names as different as " Zeitloskeit " and "dure pure" should thus be 
 criticized for the same shortcoming with reference to the series that we 
 ordinarily call temporal. The reason lies in the fundamental similarity 
 of the two views. 
 
 This interpretation is corroborated, too, by another rather interesting 
 coincidence. Professor Bergson's pure duration as it is supposed to 
 characterize the "elan vital" has been identified with the Eternity of the 
 absolutist philosophers by two writers who seem at least to have opposite 
 interests in doing so. M. Moisant, writing on "God in the Philosophy 
 of Henri Bergson, "^^* finds the consciousness of the pure duration to be 
 an expression of the Eternal. This article is naturally favorable in its 
 attitude. On the other hand, Mr. BalsiUie discusses "Bergson on Time 
 and Free Will"^^^ in a not altogether favorable tone, and concludes what 
 is perhaps his chief criticism as follows: "The distinction between past, 
 present, and future disappears, and our author virtually assents to the 
 views of certain Neo-Hegelians, that beneath our finite form of conscious- 
 ness there is a real mental life in an eternal present which a more attentive 
 psychology can reach." In other words, an interpretation of his pure 
 duration analogous to that urged in this paper is made by one man to 
 defend and vindicate, and by another to attack, this much-discussed 
 system of philosophy. This again is a coincidence, but no mere coin- 
 cidence. 
 
 There remains one striking detail of the Bergsonian conception that 
 must be mentioned in closing, viz., his conclusion that, under some condi- 
 tions, effects may precede rather than follow their causes. Perhaps it is 
 justifiable here to quote somewhat at length. "In resuming a conversa- 
 tion which had been interrupted for a few moments we have happened to 
 notice that both we ourselves and our friend were thinking of some new 
 
 '2' Solomon, The Phil, of Bergson, Mind, 1911, pp. 15-40, and David Morrison, 
 Review of Eucken's Geisl. Strom, in Mind for 1905, p. 268. 
 '2* Revue de Philosophic, April, 1905. 
 '^Mind, 1911, pp. 357-378. 
 
TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 93 
 
 object at the same time. The reason is, it will be said, that each has 
 followed up for his own part the natural development of the idea at which 
 the conversation had stopped: the same series of associations has been 
 formed on both sides.— No doubt this interpretation holds good in a 
 fairly large number of cases; careful inquiry, however, has led us to an 
 unexpected result. It is a fact that the two speakers do connect the new 
 subject of conversation with the former one: they will even point out the 
 intervening ideas; but, curiously enough, they will not always connect 
 the new idea, which they have both reached, with the same point of the 
 preceding conversation, and the two series of intervening associations 
 may be quite different. WTiat are we to conclude from this, if not that 
 this common idea is due to an unknown cause— perhaps to some physical 
 influence— and that, in order to justify its emergence, it has called forth 
 a series of antecedents which explain it and which seem to be its cause, 
 but are really its effect. "^^^ And "WHien a patient carries out at the 
 appointed time the suggestion received in the hypnotic state, the act 
 which he performs is brought about, according to him, by the preceding 
 series of his conscious states. Yet these states are really effects and not 
 causes: it was necessary that the act should take place; it was also neces- 
 sary that the patient should explain it to himself; and it is the future act 
 which determined, by a kind of attraction, the whole series of psychic 
 states of which it is to be the natural consequence, "i" The association- 
 alist's way of accounting for these phenomena is so familiar that we need 
 not even discuss it. It is important, however, to see (1) that if Professor 
 Bergson's account is the true one, we have here a wonderfully vivid 
 argument for the transcendence by consciousness of the simple mechani- 
 cal time series; and (2) that whether the account he gives is vaUd or not, 
 Mr. Balsillie (in the article above referred to) is certainly right in seeing 
 in the type of explanation offered a conclusive evidence that the author's 
 pure duration is an expHcit form of time-transcendence. 
 
 Apropos of the question whether an effect may precede its cause, 
 there is another phenomenon that is even less susceptible to associational 
 explanation than those mentioned in the foregoing paragraph. Dream 
 life abounds in occurrences like the following: I am inflating a balloon 
 and keep blowing it up larger and larger until Anally it bursts with a loud 
 report, and I find that I have been awakened by the bang of a door. Or 
 again, I drive a hard bargain with the guide to escort me to the top of the 
 Great Pyramid. Finally agreed, he leaps upon the first high step and 
 
 >2« Time and Free Will, p. 156. 
 »" Ibid., p. 157. 
 
94 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 
 
 says " Come up! " and I find that I have really been called to "get up, " — 
 that it is breakfast time, etc. The climax of the dream is obviously due 
 to an outer cause, but the dream plot "works up to it" whereas the ex- 
 ternal cause was sudden and quite without discernible antecedents. Of 
 course, it is possible to explain these cases too without resorting to the 
 rather ulterior consideration of real time-transcendence (by saying, for 
 instance, that the sleeper did detect the immediate antecedents of the 
 disturbing incident and that the whole dream drama took place in a few 
 instants of time, or, again, that it is an illusion of memory) but it seems to 
 me that these dream events may at least serve as more probable illustra- 
 tions of Professor Bergson's principle than the examples he himself gives. 
 Finally, it may be well to state once more the general position of this 
 paper. The above detailed criticism has been only to a minor degree 
 directed against the general conceptions of the great French philosopher. 
 As a rule the writer finds himself in most enthusiastic agreement with 
 them. Our objection has been chiefly to the terms used, not the ideas 
 back of them. After giving some reasons for thinking that the facts of 
 consciousness cannot be divested of all quantitative relationships, even 
 those of greater and less, etc., and that a multiphcity that has no affilia- 
 tion to number has yet to be demonstrated, we have tried to show (1) 
 that quantitative time cannot be, or at least has not successfully been, 
 identified with space; and (2) that the pure duration which is qualitative 
 only, which has no relation to magnitude, which is not limited in its 
 existence to the fleeting moment, but in which the past lives and the 
 future is foreshadowed, — this pure duration which is the necessary pre- 
 supposition of knowledge, of change, and of freedom, and is the ultimate 
 "ens reahssimum" of the inner conscious life, is essentially identical with 
 the time-transcendence of the philosophies of the schools, and in particu- 
 lar with the "ewiges Geistesleben" that is the heart of Professor Eucken's 
 philosophy. Although the two men here discussed start from quite 
 different data, and follow different aims by altogether different methods, 
 we are satisfied that, so far as the time problem is concerned, they reach 
 nearly the same conclusions. And these fundamental similarities in 
 spite of outward differences are, from a general standpoint, more impor- 
 tant than the individual views of the two men, immensely interesting 
 though the latter may be. 
 
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