inadequate, and again that no idea can be inadequate if it is not more or less false. This is the main point on which Professor Watson and myself seem to differ.
In reply to detail it is hard for me to say anything where I so often fail to apprehend. As I do not hold “a pure continuous quantity” to be self-consistent, how, when time is regarded thus, am I affected? How is it relevant to urge that time “can be thought,” when the question is whether it can be thought consistently, and surely not in the least whether it can be thought at all? And if it is so easy to understand that the idea of change is not really inconsistent, cannot Professor Watson formulate it for us in a way which is true and ultimate, and then explain what right he has to treat it as calling for correction? The objection—to turn to another point—raised against the doctrine of distinct time-series,[1] I am unable to follow. Why and how does this doctrine rest on the (obviously false) view of time’s independent reality? Why, because time is an aspect of the one reality, must all series in time have a temporal unity? Why again must there be only one causal order? Where again and why am I taken as holding that “pure time” has direction? With regard to these criticisms I can only say that I find them incomprehensible.
Nor do I understand what in the end Professor Watson thinks about the ultimate truth of succession and change. The view of Reality as one self-consciousness realizing itself in many self-consciousnesses does not, so far as Professor Watson has stated it, appear to my mind to contain any answer whatever to this question. The many selves seem (we know) to themselves to be a succession of events, past, present and future. By a succession I do not of course mean a mere succession, but still I mean a succession. Well, all this birth and death, arising and perishing of individuals, is it ultimately true and real or is it not? For myself, I reply that it is not so. I reply that these successive individuals are an appearance, necessary to the Absolute, but still an appearance, self-inconsistent, mixing truth with falsehood, and—if and so far as you offer it by itself as the truth—then not the truth but a mere appearance. And I have answered this question as best I could, because it seemed to me a question that must be answered by any one who undertakes seriously to deal with the Absolute and the Time-process. And I do not say that Professor Watson has not answered this question at all. But, if he has answered it, I am myself unable to discover what his answer means.
On the subject of time the reader may consult with advantage a paper by Mr. Bosanquet in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. iii, No. 2.
- ↑ Phil. Rev. p. 495.
