Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/352

 propositions. In the same way it may be possible in the future to enlarge our notions of time. As far as our present knowledge goes, however, the propositions we make regarding time are justified, and there is no present likelihood of its becoming necessary for us to change our ideas. In meta-mathematics there is a possibility of some solid result, but the same cannot be said of the theory of different time-series, in different directions.

The ‘apriority’ of time in Kant’s sense must also be given up; for it is not of course a ready-made form which we apply from the first to sensations as they arise in us, but an inference from change in sensation as felt. Kant still believed with the older psychologists that our sensations come to us as isolated units which have then somehow to be united, or subjected to the forms of the mind. It is a belief that has come down as far as Green, to whom relations are still ‘the work of the mind,’ which therefore constitutes experience for us. On the contrary, it is rather the case that our knowledge would be inexplicable if all that we derived from without were a series, — not felt as a series, — of simple unrelated sensations. If this were so, then indeed the theory of idealism would be justified, — that our world of experience is through and through the creation, both in form and in matter, of a consciousness, through which each individual recreates the world for himself With Kant all that we can know is held to be the creation — necessary creation, perhaps — of our minds; for ultimately the very differences of sensations, since they are not felt, must be the work of thought; and Green has only interpreted this consistently. But change of sensation, difference of sensation, must be experienced by us before, on their basis, we can build up our world of experience. It is useless to say that a change, a relation of sensations, is not a sensation; it is certainly not the sensations of which it is a relation or change, but experienced it must be. As James has said, — “If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum naturâ, so surely and more surely do feelings exist to which these relations are known.” When we have finally got rid of the old psychology, — of ‘simple ideas of sensation’ and the like, we shall no longer be tempted to glorify our own part in the creation of the world of experience, and on the other hand to disparage that world as inadequate to the real world, but shall be content to regard the work of thought as abstraction from the given, and the predication of such abstracts of the real. More than this it is not, — it is representative, not creative.

Time as a form of perception in Kant’s sense gives us accordingly no difficulty; as such it is one of the logical