The tendency to foist permanence upon the restless nature of time is clearly the result of the misleading habit of making time analogous with space. We of modern times owe much of this misunderstanding to Newton's Principia, and one can hardly read the Scholia of Proposition VIII. without realising that this "time absolute, true and mathematical" which "flows regularly (æqualiter fluit)" and which is nevertheless credited with duration, that is with permanence, is but the pale abstraction from absolute space which "ever remains like and immovable (semper manet similare et immobile)". In the same way, the sections on Time in the Kritik owe their obvious weakness to the failure inevitably attending every effort to treat spatial and temporal reality after the same fashion.
If now succession is admitted to constitute the nature of the temporal manifold, it must next be distinguished from other sorts of multiplicity by its characteristic irrevocableness. The moment never returns, the past is gone beyond recall, the present is always a new phenomenon. More closely studied the 'irrevocable event or moment' differs from the 'revivable' thing, in that its manifold lacks the identity which belongs to the latter. The 'moment' is precisely such a phenomenon as has no permanence and will not recur, while the 'position in space' has an identity and thus a permanence and unchangeableness, such that it may be observed again and again. It is for this reason that Kant, as has been shown, in his later discussion treats permanence as a spatial relation, while Schopenhauer repeatedly emphasises[1] the "starre, unveränderliche Beharren des Raums". It will be necessary, later, to widen a little this distinction between irrevocable and revivable, so as to include within the latter class mathematical and musical, as well as spatial, series. At this point of our study we have to differentiate the abstract from the concrete succession, that is, moments from events. The distinction is psychologically an abstraction, since we are never conscious of empty time, but always of past, present and future events, but the abstraction is a justifiable one, and we do mean always, by 'the moment,' the relatively empty unit of a successive manifold, the event in which the object of our attention is not any part of the specific content colour or sound or emotional tinge but just the bare fact of its being one of an unrecurring series.
- ↑ Welt als Wille, u.s.w., i., §4, p. 11.
