Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/253

 IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTURE TIME EXIST? 237 both. This point relates to the use which both propose to make of the psychological doctrine that what Mr. Hodgson calls the " empirical present moment of my experience," and Mr. Bosanquet, more tersely, " our present," " has no fixed limits ". It is true that Mr. Bosanquet's main argument is not affected by this point, and that he twice expressly waives a full discussion of it ; still he uses it as an objection to Lotze's statement of the problem, and his words seem to imply that there are pertinent difficulties lurking in it. I think it is as well that they should be dragged to the light, not only because they vitally affect Mr. Hodgson's proposed solution, but also because they help to make clear the general nature of time ; lastly, too, because I fear I am heretical with regard to them. Mr. Bradley, at all events, so far as I under- stand him, is against me : " There can," he says (Principles of Logic, p. 53), " be no part of the succession of events so small or so great, that conceivably it might not appear as present ". Now I do not wish to enter into a psychological argument, for which I am very ill equipped ; but I think that at all events this state- ment should be guarded against the use which Mr. Bosanquet and Mr. Hodgson seem to make of it, by the following proviso : " But not if it appears as a succession". Surely the psychological doctrine is only meant to emphasise the fact that in time, as in space, there is a minimum sensibile ? The rate of change in our consciousness can only be measured against an objective standard, and the shortest events that we can discover by introspection may turn out to occupy a considerably longer duration than, e.g., one revolu- tion of a wheel revolving at 200 per second. Moreover it may be discovered that different persons, or the same person at different periods, differ in respect of the amount of inner change which corresponds to some such fixed outer standard. But this would only mean that the minimum sensibile of what Kant calls the " inner sense " has a merely relative value. The case here is different from that of space, because there we have only to compare the divisions which we can discover in the content of our space-presentation, with those which science necessarily infers to be actual or possible, whereas here we have to compare the successive moments of our consciousness not only with inferred motions in space but also with the content of our presentations. Time, in short, as Kant says, is a form not only of the outer but also of the inner sense. Now, as a form of the outer sense, it is precisely similar to space in respect of its infinite divisibility ; but in it, as in space, it is impossible to detect divisions below a certain degree of minuteness. When, however, time appears as form of inner sense this minimum sensibile of presented content corresponds exactly to the minimum sensibile of the same content, viewed as psychical event; but it is also as necessary in the history of consciousness as in physical history to regard time as infinitely divisible. Hence I entirely concur with Mr. Hodgson when he says : " The present moment of the existence of the real