Transient

“ Cherish, then, constant consciousness of that solemn eternity, and let your eyes be ever directed to it, like a man who sees some great flush of light on the horizon, and is ever turning from his work to look. Use the transient as preparation for the eternal, the fleeting days as those which determine the undying 'Day' and its character. Keep your cares and interests in the present rigidly limited to necessary things. Why should travellers burden themselves? The less luggage, the easier marching. ”

“ Upper transit (Astron.) , the passage of a heavenly body across that part of the meridian which is above the polar axis.
Trans"it, v. t. (Astron.) To pass over the disk of (a heavenly body) .
Tran*si"tion (?) , n. [L. transitio: cf. F. transition. See Transient.] 1. Passage from one place or state to another; charge; as, the transition of the weather from hot to cold.
There is no death, what seems so is transition. ”

“ H93.01 Transient ischemic deafness H93.011 Transient ischemic deafness, right ear H93.012 Transient ischemic deafness, left ear H93.013 Transient ischemic deafness, bilateral H93.019 Transient ischemic deafness, unspecified ear H93.09 Unspecified degenerative and vascular disorders of ear H93.091 Unspecified degenerative and vascular disorders of right ear H93. ”

“ RESTLESS, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. ”

“ Twenty years—and he fought on, though he knew that the ultimate end was an assured thing, though he felt it at the back of his soul, blowing in from the Broadway jungle like the seven black winds of destiny.
Thirty years—and the Hotel Marquis, once the last word in elegance and modernity, had become a third-rate stopping-place for transients. But still Jabez Massingham stayed on; watching Broadway like a bird fascinated by a snake; feeling it crawl and creep and breathe; feeling it move, as if a single desire, a single hateful purpose, actuated the entire mass of stone and steel. ”

“ Our primitive perception is of change, not of stability; we are conscious of transition. The static point of view must be completed by the dynamic.
The complete separation of present and past is a mathematical fiction. The sum of transition which is a factor in appetite aids in forming the series. Time is a form of appetite; beneath the floating image there is a tendency to movement. A non-volitional being would have no representation of time: time is a form of appetition. ”

“ For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the [3] slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. ”

“ Expansion not bounded by matter. The mind, having got the idea of the length of any part of expansion, let it be a span, or a pace, or what length you will, can, as has been said, repeat that idea, and so, adding it to the former, enlarge its idea of length, and make it equal to two spans, or two paces ; and so, as often as it will, till it equals the distance of any parts of the earth one from another, and increase thus till it amounts to the distance of the sun or remotest star. ”

“ But already we may speak of the body as an ever advancing boundary between the future and the past, as a pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. Whereas my body, taken at a single moment, is but a conductor interposed between the objects which influence it and those on which it acts, it is, on the other hand, when replaced in the flux of time, always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed. ”

“ We, who thousands of years ago passed through the transition, from the personal, animal view of life to the socialized view, imagine that that transition was an inevitable and natural one; but this transition through which we have been passing for the last eighteen hundred years seems arbitrary, unnatural, and alarming. ”

“ The nice men there have their homes, their clubs, their offices, their funny little favorite restaurants where the waiters frown on transients, their own tight, clannish circles, chillily inhospitable to newcomers from younger and more enthusiastic lands. ”

“ There is no Nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense. ”

“ Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of Movement treat it, severally, either as a standard of measure or as something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite.
8 Movement Time cannot be- whether a definite act of moving is meant or a united total made up of all such acts- since movement, in either sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any movement not in Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable.
In a word, Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes place. ”

“ The simultaneities of physical phenomena, absolutely distinct in the sense that the one has ceased to be when the other takes place, cut up into portions, which are also distinct and external to one another, an inner life in which succession implies interpenetration, just as the pendulum of a clock cuts up into distinct fragments and spreads out, so to speak, lengthwise, the dynamic and undivided tension of the spring. ”

“ This Succession of temporal Ideas impressed, or excited in the Mind, as an Effect of Matter in Motion, producing a perpetual Change, both of Objects earthly and celestial, enables us not only to reflect upon past Vicissitudes of Nature, but from their regular Courses, known Order and Returns, predict Phænomena to come, and prove the periodical Effects of Nature's constant Laws so just and certain, that Time may be said with Truth, to co-exist with Motion. ”

“ Once admit the principle that a feeling may be tinged by the reproductive consciousness of an habitual transition, even when the transition is not made, and it seems entirely natural to admit that, if the transition be habitually in the order abcdef, and if a, c, and f be felt separately at all, a will be felt with an essential earliness, f with an essential lateness, and that c will fall between. ”

“ So far the passage of nature has been considered in connexion with the passage of durations; and in this connexion it is peculiarly associated with temporal series. We must remember however that the character of passage is peculiarly associated with the extension of events, and that from this extension spatial transition arises just as much as temporal transition. ”

“ In a word, the movement of the inorganic world is obvious and palpable, and might be likened to the minute-hand of a clock, the progress of which can be seen and heard, whereas the fluctuations of the living creation are nearly invisible, and resemble the motion of the hour-hand of a timepiece. ”

“ According to theory, the increased speed of the revolutions would cause a rift in the time continuum, or in other words, would change the proportion between your existence in the temporal and material realms and change your location in time, thereby propelling you into the past or the future, depending upon which was chosen, electron or proton, past or future. ”

“ The early centuries, like the cycles of the astronomer, pass through our mind rather as one continuous period; the later centuries, like the cycles of the geologist, arrest our thoughts by a succession of minor periods, and hence the idea of duration is more vividly suggested by the diversified events of the one series, than by the comparatively unbroken continuity of the other. ”

“ During growth, which is an increase of form and structure by a succession of changes, it also exhibits a new mode of motion, which is vitality or life, and the cessation of this activity is death, when the plant returns to the geonomic world by decay. But assimilation, growth and life are continued from one generation to another, and imply time from period to period. ”

“ For the identity in time of an existing thing (as in this work I have mentioned) you require both temporal continuity and again sameness in the thing’s proper character. And mutatis mutandis what is true here about temporal continuity is true also about spatial, and not to perceive this would be an error. Now whether a wholly unbroken continuity in time or space is requisite for the singleness of a thing, is a question I here pass by; [6] but some unbroken duration obviously is wanted if there is to be duration at all. ”

“ A consciousness for which events that happened within a millionth of a second constituted a definite and observable serial succession of present facts, or, on the other hand, a consciousness for which the events occurring during a thousand years were as much present at once, to a single glance at temporal succession, as are now, to us, the successions that, while not too rapid, occur within a time-span of two seconds, — either one of these types of consciousness would have a profoundly different basis for estimating the significance of any given empirical facts of succession. ”

“ Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some phenomenon of Movement: obviously it cannot be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since, in its characteristic idea, it is concerned with change. ”

“ Contrariwise, a statement of that past condition of the earth as a mechanical condition of the later emergence of life means that that past stage is taken not merely as past, but as in process of transition to its future, as in process of alteration in the direction of life. ”

“ If we are to accept the persistence of energy, we must accept the persistence of motion; if we are to accept the persistence of motion, we are compelled to accept the persistence of motion as speed in every particle. ”

“ The uniformity and unchangeableness of the conceived physical flow would be a merely given character, dependent, perhaps, upon the fact that the physical movement in question was conceived as meeting with no obstacle or external hindrance; but the direction of the flow of time is a character essential to the very conception of time. ”

“ I prefer also the word expansion to space, because space is often applied to distance of fleeting successive parts, which never exist together, as well as to those which are permanent. In both these (viz. expansion and duration) the mind has this common idea of continued lengths, capable of greater or less quantities. For a man has as clear an idea of the difference of the length of an hour and a day, as of an inch and a foot. ”

“ I will go down and set the machinery in motion in a quiet way and buy the crop. It will cheer the drooping spirits of the boys, in a transitory way. Everything is transitory in this world. Sixty days hence, when they are called to deliver the goods, they will think they've been struck by lightning. ”

“ The structures thus produced have functions which are also analogous to those of living beings, a double current of diffusion, an evolutionary existence, and a latent vitality when desiccated or congealed.
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CHAPTER VI PERIODICITY
Periodic Precipitation.—A phenomenon is said to be periodic when it varies in time and space and is identically reproduced at equal intervals. We are surrounded on all sides by periodic phenomena; summer and winter, day and night, sleep and waking, rhythm and rhyme, flux and reflux, the movements of respiration and the beating of the heart, all are periodic. ”

“ But a line can be traversed in either direction, while conceptual time is supposed to permit but one way of passing from one instant to another in its course. An uniform flow, or other motion, has, like time, a fixed direction, but might be conceived as returning into itself without detriment to its uniformity. ”

“ In this argument he assumes that the transference of motion is the transfer of speed, but we have demonstrated that the transference of motion is only the transfer of direction by change in the paths of each, which is simple and can be understood by a boy. ”

“ The fourth mode of action is by continuance, the very steward and almoner, as it were, of nature. We apply the term continuance to the abandonment of a body to itself for an observable time, guarded and protected in the meanwhile from all external force. For the internal motion then commences to betray and exert itself when the external and adventitious is removed. The effects of time, however, are far more delicate than those of fire. ”

“ Greatest length of time, therefore, in this case, is only another name for greatest number of successions.
It has been already seen, that there is nothing in which we are so deeply interested, as an accurate knowledge of the antecedents and consequents, in the midst of which we exist. Of the different innumerable trains of antecedents and consequents which it is important for us carefully to mark, it is observed, that some succeed more quickly, some less. While the long pendulum of an eight-day clock is performing one oscillation, the short pendulum of a table-clock performs two or three. ”

“ They say that when a man reports for duty at Transuranic Station he spends his whole first day peering raptly from the lookout, and then never goes up there again. It's nearly the truth—the novelty of being on the Moon wears off fast, when nothing out there ever changes. ”

“ In occult science such epochs may be termed cycles.20 In that period which follows the two preparatory epochs, and precedes those of the ebb-tide—that is to say, during the time of the separation of the Moon—three epochs can again be distinguished. The middle period is the time when the Sons of Life reached the human level. ”