Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/230

V. TIME AS RELATED TO CAUSALITY AND TO SPACE. BY MAKY WHITON CALKINS. I. THE PHENOMENAL CATEGOBY OF NECESSAEY CONNEXION. Two fundamental errors, one positive and one negative, still contribute to a radical misunderstanding of the nature of time. Metaphysicians insist, as they have insisted for cen- turies, on treating Time and Space as .analogous, and on attributing to the one the characteristics of the other ; and, with the same persistence, they overlook the fundamental and far-reaching likeness between Time and Causality. This paper aims to suggest the proper relations of time to causality and to space, and their common reference to a more ultimate category. Everybody will agree that all three may be regarded as varying sorts of unification of different kinds of multiplicity ; causality as a connexion of events, time as a series of moments, and space as a relation of points or positions. This unity is, however, phenomenal, not ulti- mate ; a connexion of facts, 1 that is of relatively separate, artificially isolated portions of reality qualities, things, events or moments ' accepted ' without investigation. This relative separateriess and independence, which is an essential characteristic of the phenomenon, makes it a convenient object of scientific observation and classification, but debars it from the claim to ultimate reality, on any monistic hypothesis of an absolute unity underlying all multiplicity. To the idealist, for instance, to whom the universe is fundamentally the vital unity of individual selves within an absolute self, the temporal, spatial or causal relation of phenomena is through and through mechanical, superficial rather than essential ; a connexion, relatively extrinsic, of isolated bits of reality regarded as relatively independent. 1 Cf. Bradley's definition of facts, Appearance and Reality, p. 317. " Any part of a temporal series . . . can be called an event or fact, ior it is taken as a piece. ..."