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Some Views of the Time Problem 



A DISSERTATION 
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 

AND LITERATURE 



DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



W. 



BENJAMIN W. VAN RIPER 



MENASHA, WISCONSIN 

Qllfe Collegiate ^re»» 

GEORGE BANTA PUBLISHING COMPANY 
1916 



313 6 32 
3 



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 



PART II 

A Comparison of the Views of Time held by Professor Eucken and 

Bergs on 

A. Progessor 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 Bergson's Conception 67 

I. His Theory of the Intellect as a " Spatializer" 68 

II. His Disproof of the Idea of Intensive Magnitude 71 

1. Its relation to the quality 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 Bergson's "Duree Pure" to the Timeless- 

ness of Eucken's " Geistesleben" 84 

I. Its Function in Perception 84 

II. Pure Memory and the "Geistige Gegenwart" 85 

III. Succession and the Consciousness of Succession 86 

IV. 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 what 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 1 and Aristotle approach nearest to the modern problem. The 
former became, in his later philosophy, a little suspicious of his own 

1 Timaeus, pp. 37-39; Parmenides, pp. 141, 152 f.; Laws, 676; Republic, x, 608- 
Phaedo, 107 (Jowett Tr.). 



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 2 narrowly escapes the modern problem. Change and move- 
ment he understands as characteristic of imperfection. 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 3 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 

2 Physics, iv, ii, 14, etc. Metaphysics, p. 309ff. (McMahon's Tr.). 

3 L. Constant, Cours de M. Bergson sur Fhistoire de Vidce de Temps, Rente de Phi- 
losophic Jan. 1904. 



ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM / 

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 4 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 ot 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! 5 
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 6 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. 

6 Cf ., however, the article by Henry Sturt, in Vol. 25 of the Encyclopedia Brilannica, 
on Space and Time. 

* Confessions, Book xi, Ch. 14, 15, 16. 



8 SOME VIEWS OE 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, 7 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 8 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 

7 Cf. above, Constant's report on Bergson. 

8 Oeuvres, Vol. iii, pp. 97-99, Letter to Vatier, Nov. 1643. 



ASPECTS OF THE TIME PROBLEM VJ 

be successfully carried through is a different matter, — one which can 
hardly be discussed here. 

Spinoza's 9 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 10 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, 11 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- 

9 Spinoza, Meta. Cog., C. 4 and Ethica, pp. 2, 270-276. 

10 Works of L. (Duncan's Tr.), p. 244 ff. and Russell, Phil, of Leibnitz, pp. 127-130. 

11 Prinripia, Ed. 1714, pp. 5, 7, etc. 



10 SOME VIEWS OF 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 12 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 13 from his "dogmatic 
slumber" and so led to his revolutionary conception of the absolute 
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 

12 Treatise, pp. 26-68. 

13 Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 24-33 (Mtiller'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 flat 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. 14 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. 

14 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 



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. 15 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" 

15 Cf . Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science. 



14 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

of changeless being, to usurp all the reality in sight. 16 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 reality 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 
slightly 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 

18 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 "What 
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 realist-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, (l).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 1 7 

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," 17 yet he insists, on the other hand, that while "things 
do certainly appear to me, and to all men, very frequently and somewhat 
indefinitely to change, I cannot immediately convert this claim into an 
indubitable proposition that things do, in reality, change." 18 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 

17 Ladd, A Theory of Reality, p 145. 

18 Ibid., p. 145. 



18 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

changeless. This is the literal implication 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." 19 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 

10 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." 20 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, 

,0 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 applicable 
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 sufficient 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 
possibility of change is thus logically bound up with the equivalent 
reality 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, 21 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 actuality, 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. 22 " 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." 23 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." 24 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 

51 McTaggert, Unreality of Time, Mind, 1908. 

52 V. Welby, Time as Derivative, Mind, 1907. 
M Ibid., p. 398. 

u p. 393. 



22 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

as the functions of memory and expectation develop, we ultimately 
translate Change into Time," 25 etc. Perhaps these statements are not 
very vividly illuminating, but whatever plausibility they may have will 
s erve 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 memory 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, 26 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 change 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. 

26 Zur Analysis der Wirklichkcit, pp. 108-109. 



THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 23 

time passes by, but that to just the extent to which we admit the reality 
of change we are bound to admit the reality of time, and vice 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 concerning 
the dubious existence of time. The past and the future by definition 
do not exist; only the present is real. But the present turns out to have 
no duration, and so it, taken alone, is not properly time at all; therefore 
time does not exist. And I suppose that one might just as well add 
that since, by definition, the present is only a part of time, it too is non- 
existent if time as such does not exist. Thus we seem, as Berkeley 
once remarked, "lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties." 27 
Professor Fullerton 28 has called our attention to the fact that something 
over a thousand years ago St. Augustine was disturbed on this same 
point. " Those two times, past and future, how can they be, when the 

past is not now, and the future is not yet? Where, then, 

is the time we may call long? Is it future? We do not say of the 
future 'It is long'; for as yet there exists nothing to be long. We say, 
'It will be long.' But when?" Surely not when it is present, etc., etc. 
His solution, — that "long," "short," etc., when applied to time, must 
be interpreted in terms of memory and anticipation only evades the point 
by transferring 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 are to give common language any consideration at all we shall 
find some of its expressions about as near a real theory of transcendence 
as some other of its expressions are far away from such a theory. While it 
would be scandalized at the suggestion that any past moment could be 
real, it would be equally offended if one should say, "There is no such 
thing as the past or future!" On the one hand the past is not real; that 
is 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 
saying that the past did exist, because then it was present, not past at 
all. No, there is a past, — at least I do not mean sheer nothingness 
when I speak of it. It is no wonder that common sense is so frequently 
outraged by the "philosophers" because, in the chaotic, hit-or-miss 
accumulation of common sense judgments that the race has acquired, 

27 Principles of Human Knowledge, Par. 98. 

28 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 29 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 30 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. 31 

29 Psychology, Sec 91, quoted by James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. i, p. 639. 

30 World and Individual, Vol. ii, p. 130ff. 

31 Cf. also Coudillac, Treatise on Sensation, Ch. iv, and K. E. von Bar, Wekhe 
Aufassung der lebenden Natur 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 2,2 
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" 33 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!" 34 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 

32 p. 309 ff. 

33 p. 310. 

34 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 Fullerton 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." 35 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." 36 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." 37 In short, whatever one may choose to think about 
the reality 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 

35 System of Metaphysics, p. 205. 

36 Ibid., p. 207. 

37 Theory of Reality, p. 188. 



THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 27 

there are difficulties 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 silently 
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 OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

of course, which needs explanation. Kant 38 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 39 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. 

88 Critique of Pure Reason, Second Analogy, pp. 155-172 (Muller's Tr.). 
39 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 40 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 
cylinder 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 cylinder 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. 

40 Jas. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. i, p. 203. In this discussion he at 
least quotes Helmholtz (Wissenshaftliche Abhandlungen, Bd. iii, p. 594) with implied 
agreement with the latter's position. And Helmholtz 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 time, while a given series 
of points in time cannot be experienced a second time. 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 RELATIVITY 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 41 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, 

41 Cf . Bergson, Time and Free Will. 



32 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

taking the metaphor in a perfectly literal 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 peculiari- 
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 infinitely 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 meaning 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 type), 
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. 42 
In this it is insisted that "idealistic eternalism" 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 
idealistic 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- 

42 Journal of Phil., Psy., and Scientific 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 dealing 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 OE 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 t-hings- 
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 unamrmable 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 certaiDly real, but are they any more real 



THE RELATIVITY OF 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 
reality 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 limitations 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 literally " 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 foUowed it out to an infinite 
number of terms to see if there be an end! The series 1, 3^, H, H, . . 
. . . 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 try to conceive of time as some 



THE RELATIVITY OF TIME 39 

ultimate, trans-experiential fact, then infinity for it could only mean 
absolute indetermination, — which means absolute unreality and nothing- 
ness. But if we regard it as a form of relating elements in experience, 
then it is just as real as those related elements are, and its infinity (in 
the only conceivable meaning of the term when applied to a law) is a 
perfectly valid inference from its actual nature as a concrete fact. 

(2) And its infinite divisibility, on the view here defended, would 
be interpreted in a precisely analogous manner. Time is infinitely 
divisible. But this does not mean that it is infinitely divided. As 
known in experience it is not a sum of zero durations, nor of infinitesmal 
increments that are nearly zero but not quite. Nor, even, is it made up 
of a sum of " minimum discernible" conscious units of duration. The unit 
of time is always relative to the purpose in hand. I say the " present 
century", if it is my purpose to compare centuries, or the " present 
minute" if minutes are the objects of my current reasoning. The mini- 
mum discernible is the unit of conscious time only when my present 
purpose is to realize the most minute distinction of sequence that I 
am capable of making. But the notion of infinite divisibility, like 
that of infinity, is an ideal extension of the conscious fact to its 
ideally known mathematical limit. It is the result of positive analysis. 
If the possibility of temporal synthesis is before my mind, I find that I 
can realize it in a concrete way over but a small scope of experience, 
i. e., the scope of my specious present. But I can see that as a law 
of synthesis it is endless, and thus ideally it is infinite. Similarly, 
when I attempt the process of temporal analysis, I find that I can realize 
it in a concrete way only to a limited extent, i. e., to the minimum 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 often set up, that only one 
instant can possibly exist at once? On what I have called the idealist 
view of time, this means simply that we cannot relate the same two 
events as both coexistent and sequent. Of course, no two instants of 
time can possibly exist "at the same time" because this simply denies 
that they were really two instants in the first place. Or, from a slightly 
different angle, it only means that once you have related two events in 
terms of before and after, the first is past, when considered from the 
standpoint of the second, and the second is future with reference to 
the first, etc. They are still events of consciousness and known only as 
such; and there is 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 RELATIVITY 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 hypothetical 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 we 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, reality 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 willing 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 II. 

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." 43 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." 44 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, 

43 Theory of Reality, p. 189. 

44 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." 45 And again that "the 
continuance of time — as past, present, and future — must be regarded 
as the medium in which things exist." 46 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." ! 47 

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 

45 Theory of Reality, p. 181. 

46 Ibid., p. 187. 

47 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!" 48 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 

* 3 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. 49 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 immutability 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- 

49 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 lie 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," 50 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 r61e to some extent, and moreover, it will be known just to the extent 

60 Critique of F Hire Reason (Mtiller 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 7 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 irresis- 
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 
validity 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." 81 And again, 
"While, therefore, phenomena may be supposed to vanish completely 
out of time, time itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, 
cannot be supposed away." 52 

To this argument several replies 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, 

61 Critique of Pure Reason (Miiller Tr.), p. 24. 

62 Ibid., 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 blind, 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 reality 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." 53 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 

53 Critique of Pure Reason (Miiller Tr.), 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 54 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 reality 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 realized. 

84 Introduction to Philosophy, p. 76. 



52 SOME VIEWS OF 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 affirmative. 

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 limitations, 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 naturalism, 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. 55 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. 56 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 

55 Hauptprobleme der Religions philosophie der Gegenwart, pp. 58, 69, etc. 

56 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 riving 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 57 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 living 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 

57 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 mora] 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 thuuder storm. And furthermore, 
the moments of conscious events, just as much as any other moments, 
are as such different, mutually exclusive. Temporal things are literal ly, 
as James says, " strung along"; the time relationship of before-and-after 
is itself the disintegrating element that makes an infinite multiplicity 
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 possibly 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 fitr den Einzelnen das Dasein eine rastlose Flucht von Erscheinungen, 
ak er eines selbstandigen Innenlebens entbehrt, nicht irgendwie zu 
einem Ganzen personlichen Seins und geistiger Individualist gelangt." 53 

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. 

63 Geist. Strom., p. 270. 



TWO IMPORTANT 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. 59 

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." 60 

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.") 61 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- 

69 Geist. Strom., pp. 12, 35, etc. 
so Geist. Strom., p. 120. 
61 Ibid., p. 35. 



58 SOME VIEWS OF 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. 62 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. 63 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. 64 

82 Hauptprobleme, p. 45. 

63 Geist. Strom., p. 122. 

64 Hauptprobleme, p. 31. 



TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 59 

If, now, the foregoing should seem to 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 
"vohmtarist" 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." 65 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 

88 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? 66 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 off 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 gegemiber dem 
Augenblick, ein Leben geis tiger Art." 67 To the degree to which a 
man is raised above the lifeless and perhaps the animal plane of simple 
succession, just to that extent does he become an embodiment of the 
supersensible Geistesleben. 

66 Geist. Strom., p. 270 et al. 

67 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 68 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 reality 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 
c an 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 climb higher, if they know they 
are on a ladder that dissolves into nothing at both ends and leads to 
absolutely nothing except more climbing? And on the contrary, does 
it not redeem and glorify moral effort 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 general 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 

68 Cf. Article Philosophie der Geschichte in Kultur der Gegenwart, Vol. on Sys. Phil. 



62 SOME VIEWS OE 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 

69 Cf. also Kulttir der Gegenwart, Band Systematische 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 
life 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." 70 

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. 71 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. 72 

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 

70 Geist. Strom., p. 262. 

71 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. 73 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! 74 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 time. "Die unerlassliche Voraussetzung alles 
dessen aber ist eine unmittelbare Gegenwart der ewigen Wahrheit durch 
den gesamten Verl nf der Geschichte, die Moglichkeit, sich jederzeit aus 

73 Geist. Strom., p. 267. 

» Ibid., p. 257. 



TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 65 

cdem Strom des Werdens in sie zu versetzen." 75 Indeed, under these dr- 
ums tances the individual finds even a great advantage in his connection 
with history, — the very connection that at first flush seemed to engulf 
him. The world of the Geistesk-ben 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 do 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 cculd it come in response to the efforts of 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 Unterstiitzung; 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." 76 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 Lebensfiihrung in hartem Streit 

miteinander." 77 "Das wahrhaft Grosse waren dabei nicht 

einzelne Gedanken und Bestrebungen, sondern eine neue Art des Lebens 
gegeniiber den Zwecken und Meinungen des Alltages." 78 

75 Hauptprobleme, p. 67. Cf. also Geist. Strom., pp. 268-269, etc. 

76 Geist. Strom., p. 265. 

77 Geist. Strom., p. 266. 

78 Ibid., 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. 79 

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. 80 
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 
evidently 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 fives 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 

79 Cf. Geist. Strom., pp. 266, 268, 272. 

80 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 Reality 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 whose final conclusions seem to differ as 
w dely as do his methods 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 OF 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 
intellectual 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? It 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, intelligo!" 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 mathematical sort. 
The latter method is obviously more convenient for the specific purpose 
of building honey 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. 81 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. 82 

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 analyzing), 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, in 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- 

81 Creative Evolution, p. ix ff. 

82 Cf. Time and Free Will, pp. xix, 128, etc. 



70 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

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. 83 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- 

83 Time and Free Will, p. 164, etc. 



TWO IMPORTANT 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 divisibility; 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 divisibility 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 difference 
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 hostilities 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 intensity 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 OF 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 
applied 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 applied 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 personality is its power to transcend the merely temporal, the 
Professor in the College 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 coordinate 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 time all other 
quantitative relationships are condemned precisely because of their 
quantitative character. He does recognize extensity as a quality of 
conscious states, 84 but this is deliberately 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. 

84 Matter and Memory, pp. 277-293. 



74 SOME VIEWS OF 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. What 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 valid. 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." 85 Perhaps 
that is a better way to describe the fact that 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 quality 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; 

85 Time and Free Will, p. 41. 



76 SOME VIEWS OE 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." 86 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 multiplicity, — 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 multiplicity of states of consciousness, 
which cannot be regarded as numerical without the help of some symbolic 
representation in which a necessary element is space." 87 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. " 8S 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 

86 Ibid., p. 8. 

87 Ibid., p. 87. 

88 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 qualitatively 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. " 89 
To be sure, it is pointed out at great length that the multiplicity 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 qualitative 
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." 90 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." We 
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." 91 The only question is, 
Does he establish it? Granted that conscious states melt into and 



89 Ibid., pp. 42, 43. 

90 Ibid., pp. 104-105. 

91 Ibid., p. 75. 



78 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

permeate each other without definite outlines, 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 "qualitative 
multiplicity with no likeness to number." 92 

Or again, if it is literally true that "thus in consciousness we find 
states which succeed, without being distinguished from one another," 93 
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. Balsillie 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 
just 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 multiplicity 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 
quality (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 little 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. 94 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 

92 Ibid., p. 226. 

93 Ibid., p. 227. 

94 Ibid., pp. 92-97. 



TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 79 

is whether this quantitative time is identical with space, — that being the 
ruling 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 ehrnination, — 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." 95 Of course, if space is to be defined as the homo- 
geneous! This begs the w T hole 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 

95 Ibid., p. 98. 

96 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) 97 
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 idealists 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 like 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 hypothesis 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 myself to remain 
forever in the present; I shall give up the attempt to think of a succession 
or a duration. " 98 

That is, in order to count sixty and have any clear conception of what 
it means, I must spread the whole sixty out in space and actually "picture 

97 Ibid., p. 94. 

98 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 onlv, all higher numbers 
being purely symbolic like t/^I- 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 willing 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- 

99 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" here as 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, 100 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 101 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 

100 Cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 246-259. 
io 1 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 reality 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 
intelligence, 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, 102 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 inclined to think that the same consideration would 
hold for all cases. At any rate the one case is enough for our present 
argument. 

102 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 billion 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 millions 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 

i<»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. 104 But the point we 
want to urge here is simply, Why call this capacity of consciousness to 

104 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." 105 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." 106 Compare with this the following from 
Professor Eucken: "Die Vergangenheit ist dann nicht mehr eine blosse 
Vergangenheit, sie kann ein Stuck einer zeitiiberlegenen Gegenwart 
werden und damit eine Sache eignen Lebens, unablassiger Arbeit blei- 
ben." 107 And such parallelism of statements on both sides might be 

105 A. R. Whately, The Higher Unmediacy, Mind for 1909, p. 373. Cf. also, Eucken, 
Geist. Strom., bottom of p. 270. 
108 Time and Free Will, p. 100. 
107 Geist. Strom., p. 269. 



TWO IMPORTANT THEORIES OF TIME 87 

indefinitely multiplied. 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. " 108 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 obvious 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- 

108 Time and Free Will, p. 227. 



88 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 uberlegende 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 line 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. " 109 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. 

109 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 110 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. 111 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 

110 The World and the Individual, Vol. ii, Ch. 3. 

111 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. 112 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. " 113 
"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." 114 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 Un vergangliche fallt. " 115 

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. " 116 The 

"mere manipulation of concepts is like turning a screw 

in a vacuum where it meets with no resistance." 117 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 

112 Cf. Hauptprobleme, p. 26, and Geist. Strom., p. 266. 

113 Time and Free Will, p. 231. 

114 Ibid., p. 170. 

116 Geist. Stbm.p. 271. 

116 Problem of Human Life, p. 502. 

117 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. 118 And accordingly when this mystic power that knows no explana- 
tion in words and cone epts (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. " 119 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 Mittel, sich selbst zu 
finden, sein Eigentum in vollen Besitz zu nehmen, die Kluft im eignen 
Wesen irgend zu schliessen. " 12 ° And 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. " m 

"Art lives on creation and implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of 
nature. " m 

118 Creative Evolution, p. 176. 

119 Time and Free Will, p. 170. 

120 Geist. Strom., p. 341, top. 

121 Creative Evolution, p. 177. 

122 Ibid., p. 45. 



92 SOME VIEWS OE 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. 123 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," 124 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. Balsillie discusses "Bergson on Time 
and Free Will" 125 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 

123 Solomon, The Phil, of Bergson, Mind, 1911, pp. 15-40, and David Morrison, 
Review of Eucken's Geist. Strom, in Mind for 1905, p. 268. 

124 Revue de Philosophie, April, 1905. 

125 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. What 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." 126 And "When 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. " 127 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 valid 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 explicit 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 finally 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 

126 Time and Free Will, p. 156. 

127 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 multiplicity 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 fives 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 realissimum" 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. 



BB I* 6 



BIBLIOGRAPHY l )5 

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96 SOME VIEWS OF THE TIME PROBLEM 

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Logic, pp. 195, 343 ff., 371 ff. 
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Werke, Band IV, pp. 93 ff., 127-132, 233, 240, 248 ff. 
Hobbes, Thos. 

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