Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/235

TIME AS BELATED TO CAUSALITY AND TO SPACE. 221 (b) The Temporal Unity. Up to this point the temporal manifold has been the topic of discussion. But time means more than bare multiplicity, and its moments are regarded not only as many but as unified or connected. This connexion is moreover con- sidered to be ' universal,' that is it is predicated of every possible phenomenon, so that the separateness of the phenomenon is only relative, and just by virtue of being ' event ' or ' thing ' it is by hypothesis one of a connected multiplicity. And this universality which is attributed to phenomenal connexion follows from another characteristic, its 'necessity. By the necessity of connexion is meant that the synthesis of the manifold depends on somewhat more fundamental than itself, that is upon the fundamental unity of reality which makes it impossible that any un- connected manifold should exist. This is the sort of necessary connexion, a phenomenal synthesis, founded upon an ultimate unity, which Kant shows by his tran- scendental deduction of the categories ; and the establishment and explanation of tbis unity form Kant's real answer to Hume. Only a pluralist, therefore, can deny the necessity of phenomenal connexion, and conversely no one who affirms the universality of such a relation can consistently defend the pluralist metaphysics. The necessary temporal unity is, moreover, of a particular sort. Geometrical magnitudes, for instance, are also of necessity connected, but the relation of one angle to another differs in one marked respect from the relation of one moment to another. The temporal series is not only con- nected but irreversibly connected, that is, past, present and future must be experienced in the same fixed order. One may turn one's eyes from east to west or from west to east, one may ascend or descend the musical scale, and one may count from 100 to 1 or from 1 to 100, while one cannot live the future before the present. Past, present and future must in truth be defined in terms of the irreversibleness of the necessary connexion. The past is the ' irrevocable ' member of a series, on which another member, the present, ' depends ' with which, that is to say, it is irreversibly connected. The present is therefore dependent on the past, and the future on the present, in a sense in which the past is not dependent on the present nor the present on the future ; while, on the other hand, mathematical quantities or planets in the solar system, though in a very real sense dependent on each other, yet are mutually determined.