J. L. McIntyre

“ We seek to think reality as a whole, as some kind of unity, not in the disjointed way in which it comes to us in our ordinary experience, but as uniting all the separate parts in one whole. Starting out from the separate things and events, individuals and acts, of the empirical world, we try in what way such a world is to be thought as a whole, on what pre-suppositions it could exist as it appears to us. A metaphysical theory, accordingly, can never be more than a hypothesis, and that one is to be accepted which seems best to account for all the facts given to us. ”

“ The application to the whole of reality, to the Absolute in itself and the succession of events, is easily made. Neither with the unity of the All, nor with its discrete parts can we dispense, — and the unity is not a merely formal one, but a living reality, the real subject to which all events in the universe are to be referred as its acts. It is true the notion ‘event,’ as we have seen, may require to be changed, or to be improved, for not everything that we call an event is to be regarded as an act of the Absolute ”

“ According to the latter every part of our phenomenal world has its place in the real, only all contradictions are there removed, harmonised and united in one timeless experience, — so that at any rate that which we know is not the real. But “harmony” is the most formal of terms, expressing merely the unity which is the pre-supposition of all metaphysics, even of all science: while an experience which is neither feeling nor thought nor any other form of human experience, and which in addition is timeless, is the most unknowable of unknowables. ”

“ A thing which does not change, a change which is not the change of something, an individual which does not act, and an act which is not that of an individual, are alike incomprehensible. This applies to every sphere of our knowledge. A thing is one and its special qualities are many, or it is permanent, — one in that sense, — and its changes are many; any event which we take as such is an abstraction from the continuity of all happening; it is one of the discrete points in the continuous change of the universe, yet the discreteness is as essential as the continuity. ”

“ Unless we are to distrust perception and thought altogether, to give up thinking about the real at all, then we must accept this doublesidedness of reality as ultimate. So a ‘thing’ seems on the one hand to possess a unity, in virtue of which it is that particular thing and not another, but this unity we cannot describe further, nor identify with any particular quality or relation of the thing or its parts; on the other hand, a thing has many qualities, relations to other things, relations of its qualities to one another, and accordingly many ways of acting and reacting upon other things. ”

“ If the time-succession is unreal, or only a form of appearance of the ultimately real, — from the knowledge of which we are in either case excluded, — then change is equally so, activity also, final causes or ends, development, morality, everything in fact which we regard as valuable in our universe. With the non-reality of time all these must fall, and what is there that remains? In our experience a system of thought-contents alone answers to the reality required: it alone is, as such, out of time and unchanging ”

“ Our present is therefore regulated by and dependent on the acts of the Absolute. The difficulties connected with it, — that for example of fixing in it some point which really is the present, — all depend upon our defective notion of the meaning of ‘event.’ The acts of the Absolute, even if they are no longer acts in the sense of purposive, directed to an end, but mere pulsations of experience, must be thought of as momentary, discrete, successive; there is no other way of comprehending the universe. Each act or pulsation as it exists, is the real present, or rather the content of the present. ”

“ Time in fact seems to be wholly continuous, so that any divisions we may make are arbitrary and unreal. Perhaps a way may be found of avoiding this difficulty, but for the moment let it be taken for granted with Lotze that there is a present. Now if time were an existing whole, — an independent reality, — every part would necessarily have the same reality as every other, and therefore the content of each part, whereas we actually regard only one part as real, in the full sense, the past being no longer real and the future not yet. ”

“ Whatever truth there may be in this view, it is here based on a false theory of knowledge, and of the relation of thought to reality. In a sense, of course, I must be present to the successive events of which I am conscious, but this does not prove that I am out of time any more than a tree is out of time because it suffers gradual growth and decay. The consciousness of each event, and the consciousness of their succession to each other are changes of myself as the stages of growth are changes of the tree. ”

“ It was for this reason that Leibnitz denied an absolute reality to time, as he could not conceive of a reality which was out of relation to others, that is without force or energy. Time, accordingly, is with him merely ideal, phenomenal, with however a foundation in reality, namely, the order of succession of events. He transfers the real existence from time as a whole to the separate events which take place, change and activity being necessary and inseparable determinations of any real existence. ”

“ Should time have a reality independent of our consciousness, Kant holds, then it would be impossible for us to form such a necessarily valid proposition as “Time has only one dimension.” This may be granted, but, as a matter of fact, no proposition that we can form is absolutely and necessarily valid, but is valid only under the condition that our knowledge is complete, and of this we can never be certain. ”

“ We may therefore consider the individual merely as acting, and we see at once the two aspects separate and yet united in him. For on the one hand no particular act is the individual, nor any number, nor, supposing we could exhaust them, the sum of all; just as in the case of the thing, the individual himself remains over and above his particular acts, a unity, a something we know not what, — that which acts. Yet the individual is known, and moreover is, only through and in his acts. He is not a being apart, to whom the acts are attached as beads to a string. ”

“ Similarly one would think that the Absolute Experience must at least belong to a subject, in which case we should have the distinction of the Absolute and its Experience, the same as that of Substance and Quality, which is the basis of the criticism of appearance. The fact that this experience is to be timeless is apt to veil the difficulty, and seems to give us a unity absolutely without difference, analogous to those cases of intense feeling in our own lives, when we seem to be wholly absorbed in the feeling, our individuality passing from us to it. ”

“ For just as our sole knowledge of the character of the finite individual is derived from his acts, so it is with the Infinite. He is what he does, and all our knowledge of natural events, of human events, is as such an approximation to a knowledge of the Absolute.
To apply our theory to the question of the relation of time to the Absolute, of the reality of past and future as compared with that of the present, it is obvious that the Absolute in himself is throughout all time equally real, while no act can claim higher reality than another ”

“ For change does not affect time itself, but only the phenomena in time.” “If we were to attribute succession to time itself, we should be obliged to cogitate another time, in which the succession would be possible.” Kant is speaking of the phenomenal world, but we must transfer it to the world of reality; and by time he means the whole time, as a background against which events take place, so that change is only in the latter. ”

“ We can give no reason whatever, and it is hopeless to seek one, for the fact that the modifications of the Absolute, and just such modifications, exist; nor can we form any theory of the Absolute as distinct from its modifications. For, in any case, they exist; they are therefore part of the whole of reality; if the Absolute exists apart, then it is not the whole of reality; if it exists in them, then it is merely one aspect of the whole, separate existences and acts being a distinct but equally necessary aspect. ”

“ In our developed experience “time” appears as a continuous whole, forming a background on which events are arranged, extending in one direction from the past to the future. It is both continuous and discrete, for while the events are regarded as taking place in moments of time, these moments are themselves parts of a continuous unity, and it is accordingly impossible to determine any ultimate shortest moment, since, owing to the continuity, any part of the whole, however small, seems infinitely divisible. ”

“ As far as modern problems are concerned, the question is rather as to the validity of the time-relations in their application to the ultimately real, — whether, that is, the relations, and with them the events between which they hold, are merely appearances to human sense and thought of that which is in itself timeless and changeless, or whether, on the contrary, relations and events alike are in any sense predicable of the real. ”

“ Time as a form of perception in Kant’s sense gives us accordingly no difficulty; as such it is one of the logical constituents into which our knowledge may be analysed, for we find that all events are necessarily arranged by us in a time-series, and when we look at our knowledge as a whole, time appeal's to be not so much an element of what is known, as a form in which certain elements are arranged: and hence, if we make within knowledge a distinction of subjective and objective, it may rather be ascribed to the former aspect than to the latter. ”

“ It is this which is the true reality; time as a whole therefore has no existence except as an abstraction from the relations of events in the mind of the subject, the past has no existence except in memory or as a moment in the present, the future none except in foresight or inference, or again as a moment involved in the present. The Absolute is the permanently existing real Subject, the present act the momentarily existing real event. Nor is it to be supposed that time exists between the acts, unfilled by any event, for this is just that empty time which we have seen to be illusory ”

“ In the necessity of a permanent subject all modern theories of the non-reality of time seem to have their origin. It is held that in our consciousness we have given us a timeless reality, and it is felt that the real should be explained by the highest reality which we know, — our consciousness. ”

“ When we have finally got rid of the old psychology, — of ‘simple ideas of sensation’ and the like, we shall no longer be tempted to glorify our own part in the creation of the world of experience, and on the other hand to disparage that world as inadequate to the real world, but shall be content to regard the work of thought as abstraction from the given, and the predication of such abstracts of the real. ”

“ Knowledge of the thing in itself, in this sense, we have none; the unity we speak of, taken by itself, is a mere term: we cannot know anything as a unity unless we have something to unite, that is, unless we know that of which it is the unity. On the other hand, the particulars alone give us no knowledge of the thing, otherwise we could make no distinction of one thing from others, could make no distinctions at all in our knowledge except that of one merest particular from another. ”

“ It is not merely that discrete and continuous are relative terms, the one presupposing the other, and the two, in Hegelian phrase, melting into a higher unity. The discrete and the continuous are just given together, and we must take them so; they are given to us as different aspects of the same reality. Not merely again as our finite way of looking at what is neither continuous nor discrete, but something higher than both; the very attempt to think such an “Identity” repels us, and inevitably leads to failure. ”

“ These notions are defective, for every point of a line has the same reality, whereas in time only one point has properly reality, the reality of the past being different alike from that of the present and from that of the future; even the reality of the one point, the “present,” is in a state of change. Again, the notion of a stream involves that of a source, of an end, of a bed within which the stream flows, so that we seem to think of time as something that has had a beginning, and may have an end, and which requires a background in contrast with which it is thought of as flowing. ”

“ It is thus impossible in our experience that we should ever attain to or be able to conceive a unity without diversity, and the result of Mr Bradley’s theory only furnishes a proof of this. For when he seems to make any positive statements about the real, they are inevitably open to the same charge which he brings against all other views, — that they involve the contradiction of the one in many, which we can neither avoid nor accept. ‘Harmony’ and ‘Experience’ are his favourite terms for designating the Absolute ”

“ This is the argument of Green; the possibility, it is said, of my being conscious of two successive events, as successive, — for example, of two ideas succeeding one another, — requires that consciousness, as subject, be present to both, and therefore itself out of time. In the same way, since all relations imply consciousness as a condition of their possibility, and succession is a relation, therefore we must ultimately suppose an eternal or timeless consciousness as present to, and as the condition of, the whole time-series. ”