evolution and heredity might be assumed to explain, the attempt to explain by them the origin of our consciousness of Time must fall under the ban of Kant’s saying. Time is presupposed in any association of sensible items at all; myriadfold is it presupposed in the ever accumulating, ever consolidating associations in the drift of evolution. It is the indispensable presupposition of our even figuring to ourselves the process of evolution, and it cannot have been transmitted to us except by having previously been acquired somewhere among our progenitors, more or less remote. When did it cuter the stream of evolution, and how?
Strive as one may, there is no escape from Kant’s implication that not even evolution[1] can produce Time in our consciousness — the perception of the infinite possibility of succession. For Time is the necessary presupposition without which evolving consciousness could not have the groupings of succession, hardening evermore, that are supposed to lead slowly on to the consciousness of Time as a necessary and immutable condition of experience. There is for the evolutionist no escape from Kant’s
- ↑ Even the cosmic conception of evolution was perfectly familiar to Kant. In fact, Kant was the first to expound it in grand detail (in his Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens), and he therefore cannot have failed to include it mentally in his sweeping assertion that there is a vicious circle in every attempt to found our consciousness of Time on generalisation.
