look at them for himself and come to his own conclusion only he should endeavor to look at them with unbiased judgment and strain his vision to see the truth. The author makes bold to say this: these reasons seem to him to establish the subjectivity of space as against any other theory. This view stands the test of our critical thought, and any other goes to pieces under criticism. Yet one may hesitate to affirm positively and finally that this theory represents absolute truth. "The world is too much with us" in philosophy as in religion, and at times we must doubt whether we have actually lifted the veil that hides the mystery of existence. Nevertheless, we must follow our thought, and this leads to the subjectivity of space; and therefore we hold this in our present light as our nearest approach to the nature of ultimate reality.

CHAPTER V

THE SUBJECTIVITY OF TIME

THE subjectivity of space carries with it the subjectivity of time. If there is no extended world of matter, but only a world of spirit and experience, then time as an external succession of extended things has vanished along with such things. Idealists, therefore, almost without exception, group space and time together as subjective experiences. Kant applies substantially the same arguments to time as to space in proving them intuitions of the mind.

They do belong together as subjective states of mind, but there is a fundamental difference between them, which Kant recognized by denominating space as the sense of the outer, and time as the sense of the inner, life. Space is the form which consciousness imposes on its sensational objects, and has no other existence. There is nothing really extended either in the mind or out of it, and extension is only a projection of the mind's own consciousness. Time, however, is not a form or mode imposed by the mind on its own experience, but is an inherent and essential relation of its inner states. These states of experience constitute the soul, and are the only reality we immediately know. An important fact about these states is that they exist in the time

relation. They are successive; they begin and they cease to be. One is followed by another, and taken together they form a constant stream of succession. This fact of inner succession is one of which we are immediately aware. It is not the result of reasoning or inference, but is an intuition. Nothing can be clearer and surer to us than that our thoughts begin and continue for a period of duration and then cease, or dissolve into others. Succession clings to our subjective experiences as an essential and ineradicable relation. We cannot erase or expunge it from our experience. All of our experiences are successive, and we can no more get rid of this relation than we can get rid of thought itself. Our experience of space is not spatial, but our experience of time is temporal; that is, our experience of a mile is not a mile long, but our experience of an hour is an hour long. Space is a phenomenon to the mind; time is not a phenomenon, but a reality in the mind itself. Time is our experience of succession, and if there were no succession in our minds, our thoughts could neither begin nor end, and our consciousness, instead of being a ceaseless flow or stream, would stand fixed in rigidity.

The subjectivity of time is further seen in the fact that it is not a regular flow at a fixed rate, but varies widely and surprisingly with the kind and the degree of our interest. The period we call an hour or a day does not always seem to be of the same duration. If we are enjoying a pleasure, it may seem incredibly short, and

if we are suffering intense pain, it may seem intolerably long. Listening to a sermon, we may think half an hour interminable, and listening to a song, we may think it all too short. So absorbed may we be in a subject or experience that we do not note the lapse of time at all, and a whole evening may seem as a moment, and a week or a year as swift as an arrow. These familiar experiences show us that time is not a fixed rate of succession, but is relative to our interest and is rapid and short, or slow and long, according to our attention to its flow.

Further light is thrown upon the time relation by a consideration of the time-span of our consciousness, a subject that has been developed by Professor Josiah Royce in his work on "The World and the Individual." The interval during which an object is present to our consciousness is not an absolute instant or mathematical line dividing the future from the past, for such instant or line would be no time at all, and nothing could be known in it. There is an appreciable interval during which consciousness holds before itself all the objects or the whole succession of objects in the interval. Professor Royce estimates this interval or "time-span "a very few moments" or "seconds." The succession of events in this interval must not be either too fast or too slow in order that we may perceive them. Thus the several notes of a musical phrase or the words of a sentence are present to the mind, not only successively as they flow from the future into the past, but also simultaneously while the mind grasps them as a whole

and realizes their meaning. It is the length of this time-span that determines the type of our consciousness as to what successions it can grasp and what is our sense of time. But our time-span is not a period that is necessary and universal for all minds, but is relative to us and might be widely different. We can conceive an infinitesimally short or an immensely long time-span that would perceive very rapid or very slow changes not perceivable by our time-sense, and this would give a very different type of consciousness. "Suppose," says Professor Royce, "that our conciousness had to a thousand millionth of a second, or to a million of years of time, the same relation that it now has to the arbitrary length in seconds of a typical present moment. Then, in the one case, we might say: 'What a slow affair this dynamite explosion is!' In the other case, events, such as the wearing of the Niagara gorge, would be to us what a single musical phrase now is, namely, something instantaneously present, and grasped within the arbitrary present moment. Such relations to time would be no more arbitrary, no less conscious, no more or less fluent, and no more or less full of possible meaning, than is now our conscious life."1

Now let all limitations be removed from this time-span, or let it be extended to eternity, and we have a consciousness that grasps all events from everlasting to everlasting and holds them together in their unity, the omniscient consciousness of God. "For a thousand years in thy 1 "The World and the Individual," pages 227-228.

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