Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/70

 arises as to the nature of this unity, generally and in each case. The question is both difficult and interesting psychologically; but I must confine myself to the brief remarks which seem called for in this place. It is not uncommon to meet the view that the unity is timeless, or that it has at any rate no duration. On the other hand, presumably, it has a date, if not a place, in the general series of phenomena, and is, in this sense, an event. The succession I understand to be apprehended somehow in an indivisible moment,—that is, without any lapse of time,—and to be so far literally simultaneous. Any such doctrine seems to me open to fatal objections, some of which I will state.

1. The first objection holds good only against certain persons. If the timeless act contains a relation, and if the latter must be relative to a real unity, the problem of succession appears again to break out without limit inside this timeless unit.

2. But those who would deny the premises of this first objection, may be invited to explain themselves on other points. The act has no duration, and yet it is a psychical event. It has, that is, an assignable place in history. If it does not possess the latter, how is it related to my perception? But, if it is an event with a before and an after in time, how can it have no duration? It occurs in time, and yet it occupies no time; or it does not occur in time, though it happens at a given date. This does not look like the account of anything real, but it is a manufactured abstraction, like length without breadth. And if it is a mere way of stating the problem in hand—viz., that from one point of view succession has no duration—it seems a bad way of stating it. But if it means more, its meaning seems quite unintelligible.

3. And it is the more plainly so since its content is certainly successive, as possessing the distinction of after and before. This distinction is a fact; and,