Simultaneity

“ When, in so-called association by similarity, a presentation is recalled through the recurrence in consciousness of one or more of its elements, both the recurring and the associated presentation being now together in consciousness, what was at first association through the common element becomes finally association by simultaneity. ”

“ Whitehead writes: “The very meaning of simultaneity is made to depend on light signals. There are blind people and dark cloudy nights and neither blind people nor people in the dark are deficient in a sense of simultaneity. They know quite well what it means to bark both their shins at the same instant.” ”

“ These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. ”

“ I mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of space. In these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost. ”

“ But what constitutes this singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find themselves embedded,—time, namely, and space, and the mind of the knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time. ”

“ There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other—moving out of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior work ”

“ Why do we thus invincibly crave to alter the given order of nature? Simply because other relations among things are far more interesting to us and more charming than the mere rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions. These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 'spontaneous variations' most of them, of our sensibility, whereby certain elements of experience, and certain arrangements in time and space, have acquired an agreeableness which otherwise would not have been felt. It is true that habitual arrangements may also become agreeable. ”

“ The inter-objective relations of presentations, on which their second characteristic, that of revivability and associability depends, though of the first importance in themselves, hardly call for examination in a general analysis like the present. But there is one point still more fundamental that we cannot wholly pass by: it Continuity of Consciousness. is—in part at any rate—what is commonly termed the unity or continuity of consciousness. From the physical standpoint and in ordinary life we can talk of objects that are isolated and independent and in all respects distinct individuals. ”

“ In a succession of events, say of sense-impressions, A B C D E..., the presence of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succession involves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two or more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past, present, and future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds to these differences is in consciousness simultaneously. ”

“ The only mode of union that is not contradictory is the union of close succession in time; or of position in a continued thread of conscious life. We are entitled to say that the same being is, by alternate fits, object and subject, under extended and under unextended consciousness ”

“ What is the characteristic of the psychical unities more especially? It is that of having, besides the consciousness of such perception, the feeling also of the relations that bind the whole together, and those faculties, more or less developed, which that consciousness and that perception imply. But why should these unities be any more perishable than the others? Why, if all these forces, all these activities, are eternal, should those alone not possess eternity which have this high privilege, that of knowing the infinite relations which the others sustain without knowing that they do so? ”

“ For it is a world where purposes are fulfilled, or where finite internal meanings reach their final expression, and attain unity with external meanings. Now in so far as any idea, as a finite Internal Meaning, still seeks its own Other, and consciously pursues that Other, in the way in which, as we have all along seen, every finite idea does pursue its Other, this Other is in part viewed as something beyond, towards which the striving is directed. But our human experience of temporal succession is, as we have seen, just such an experience of a pursuit directed towards a goal. ”

“ If we go on to consider persistence abstractly, we must still remember that the persistence is the persistency of a unity, an extension, a speed, and a consciousness. But between these persistent concomitants there are relations, and these relations are changeable; so when we consider persistence and change, it is the persistence of particles of essentials and change of relations of particles of essentials. Only relations are changeable, essentials are persistent. ”

“ The union which we conceive in distinct substances is either juxtaposition in space, simultaneousness in time, or the concourse of forces producing a common effect: juxtaposition in space or simultaneousness of time does not help us to explain thought, the act of the will, nor any internal phenomena ”

“ But, how can anything exist, as a whole, simultaneously, at individual times, if these times are not themselves simultaneous? But, if this Being exists, as a whole, separately and at distinct times for individual times, just as a man exists as a whole yesterday, today, and tomorrow; it is properly said that it was and is and will be. Its age, then, which is no other than its eternity, does not exist, as a whole, simultaneously, but it is distributed in parts according to the parts of time. ”

“ Thus by their continual motions backward and forward, upward and downward, the conjunction of the several parts of the universe is preserved; a union which, in the beauty we now behold it, must be eternal, or at least of a very long duration, and almost for an infinite space of time; and, whichever it is, the universe must of consequence be governed by nature. ”

“ These presently experienced states, synthetized within the moment, form the matter, or what we may term the content of the moment consciousness. The moment of consciousness will change with the changes of the synthetized content. As an official, I am now in my office doing my work, and the different experiences form one whole, an association of experiences, systematized and synthetized into an organic unity. As a family man, I am at home enjoying the company of my wife, children, and friends, and once more the experiences are organized into the unity of a moment consciousness. ”

“ As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a precisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility. The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded as the identity of its recurrent thought; and the perceptions of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally conceived to be brought about only through a multiplicity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. ”

“ The union which is thus effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. ”

“ And how can the self-same life be held at one and the same time by each individual successive link in an endless chain, seeing the life devolves but in succession, and that each link in the chain sparkles into existence and luminousness only during the short term of actual possession? ”

“ But, if neither at the same time nor at different times does it exist, as a whole, in individual places, it is evident that it does not at all exist, as a whole, in each individual place. We must now examine, then, whether this supreme Nature exists, as a whole, at individual times, either simultaneously or at distinct times for individual times. ”

“ Having thus defined the way in which the conceptual time of the real world of common sense corresponds in its structure to the structure of the time known to our inner perception, we are prepared to sketch our theory both of the sense in which the world of our idealistic doctrine appears to be capable of interpretation as a Temporal order, and of the sense in which, for this same theory, this world is to be viewed as an Eternal order. ”

“ In the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. ”

“ The unity of the Absolute Moment is, as we have seen, a fact not merely immediate, and, on the other hand, not merely inclusive of whatever mediate and interrelated contents there are in the world; but it is also a unity of consciousness determined by its reference to the whole process that we express in finite mediations. The Absolute Experience knows — or, if you please to use the familiar metaphor, sees — the perfect fulfilment of the absolute system of thought or ideas. ”

“ Time-determinations apart, the facts we have run over can all be summed up in the simple statement that objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as before. This statement we may name the law of mental association by contiguity. ”

“ Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. ”

“ It evolves in a direction which may be fortuitous, but which, once taken, cannot be changed. It simultaneously embraces the past, the present, and the future. It is a unity in time, a vast synthesis of which we are but fragments. ”

“ And there is unity of sequence, which is that of things that form links in chains, and steps in ascent, and stages in journeys, and this, in matter, is the unity of communicable forces in their continuance from one thing to another, and it is the passing upwards and downwards of beneficent effects among all things, and it is the melody of sounds, and the beauty of continuous lines, and the orderly succession of motions and times. ”

“ As with space so with time, the intrasubjective intercourse of man with man makes it possible for me mentally to extend this conceptual synthesis of moments of time so as to include nows belonging to the experience of others which were already past before the first now of their experiences which I can synchronise with a now of my own, and again nows of their experiences relatively to which the last now which synchronises with one of my own is past. ”

“ These unities, which I call events, are the emergence into actuality of something. How are we to characterise the something which thus emerges? The name ‘event’ given to such a unity, draws attention to the inherent transitoriness, combined with the actual unity. But this abstract word cannot be sufficient to characterise what the fact of the reality of an event is in itself. A moment’s thought shows us that no one idea can in itself be sufficient. For every idea which finds its significance in each event must represent something which contributes to what realisation is in itself. ”

“ The beyond can in any case exist simultaneously—for it can be experienced to have existed simultaneously—with the experience that practically postulates it by looking in its direction, or by turning or changing in the direction of which it is the goal. Pending that actuality of union, in the virtuality of which the ‘truth,’ even now, of the postulation consists, the beyond and its knower are entities split off from each other. ”

“ This relation is called simultaneousness.
Simultaneousness is often confounded with presence and with co-existence. But these three notions, rigorously speaking, differ from one another. Presence refers to terms in space; simultaneousness to terms in duration; co-existence to terms both present and simultaneous. Thus presence and simultaneousness are the constituents of co-existence. Presence is to be considered as the material constituent, because it depends on the “where,” which belongs to the thing on account of its matter or potency ”

“ In the midst of the temporal the eternal is made palpable and present to us in the beautiful, and offers itself to our enjoyment. The separation is suppressed, and the original unity, as it is in God, appears as the first, as what holds together even the past in the universe, and what constitutes the aim of the development in a finite accord. ”

“ Whenever we speak of the One, the Many usually come into our mind at the same time. Whence, then, we are forced to ask, do the Many come? This question is unanswerable by the consciousness which pictures the Many as a primary datum, and-treats the One as only one among the Many. ”