Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/350

 are therefore part of the whole of reality; if the Absolute exists apart, then it is not the whole of reality; if it exists in them, then it is merely one aspect of the whole, separate existences and acts being a distinct but equally necessary aspect.

Accordingly we must decide that contradiction, so far as it relates to the unity of many in one, and the impossibility of our grasping this unity and diversity in thought, is no criterion by which we may rule anything out of court as unreal, for there is nothing known to us, nor anything knowable by us, which is not at once a unity and a diversity, and so far therefore involves a contradiction in itself This a priori method must be given up and experience itself questioned; for the true method by which metaphysical truth may be acquired seems to be the searching out of the pre-suppositions which are necessary in order to explain what is given as real in experience. In other words, we must put the problem of metaphysics in this way: — of what nature must the ultimate reality be, in order that through it we may account for our experience? We seek to think reality as a whole, as some kind of unity, not in the disjointed way in which it comes to us in our ordinary experience, but as uniting all the separate parts in one whole. Starting out from the separate things and events, individuals and acts, of the empirical world, we try in what way such a world is to be thought as a whole, on what pre-suppositions it could exist as it appears to us. A metaphysical theory, accordingly, can never be more than a hypothesis, and that one is to be accepted which seems best to account for all the facts given to us. By such a method as this we shall here attempt to solve the metaphysical problem with which we started, — that as to the reality or non-reality of the time-process.

In our developed experience “time” appears as a continuous whole, forming a background on which events are arranged, extending in one direction from the past to the future. It is both continuous and discrete, for while the events are regarded as taking place in moments of time, these moments are themselves parts of a continuous unity, and it is accordingly impossible to determine any ultimate shortest moment, since, owing to the continuity, any part of the whole, however small, seems infinitely divisible. “The flow of time” seems thus a natural metaphor. On these results the ordinary Scientific view of time was based, — that of Newton, to whom “time, absolute, true, and mathematical, flows continuously and equably in itself without relation to any external thing.” The flow of time is unaffected by the events which take place in it, — that is, the two series, moments of time and events, seem to run parallel to, but independent of, one another. It was for this reason that