Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/373

No. 3.] other principle of the non-composition of extension and duration, they have not taken sufficient account of it in their speculations. To this principle we must return, if we would understand living nature. The contradictions involved in the other theory render its acceptance impossible. All arguments lose their force, however, if we regard extension and duration, time and space, as primordial realities, whose elements and principles we need not seek, because they admit of no composition, and result from no synthesis. Time and space are unities; their nature imposes on us a conception of life (quite different from that of Leibniz and Descartes) according to which the living being constitutes its organs instead of resulting from them.

All duration and extension, then, are one before being manifold. We see in duration a double nature: succession and simultaneity mutually imply each other. Neither pure succession nor pure simultaneity of parts of time can be conceived; both render time and thinking impossible. Absolute succession means absolute multiplicity without any principle of unity; that is, nothing. Absolute simultaneity means absolute unity without any multiplicity; that is, nothing. But in the union of these two contraries we find the real; this union is a fundamental, and therefore unanalyzable law of our mental constitution, as well as of the nature of things. The same reasoning applied to extension yields similar results. In themselves, things are neither one nor manifold, but both at the same time, and the same is true of consciousness; that is, consciousness and nature have one and the same law. Whence it happens that thought is misled to look at things under an exclusive aspect, now from the point of view of multiplicity, — now from that of unity.

The conclusion then reached is that duration and extension, time and space, present precisely the same characteristics as those attributed by us to living beings, i.e. they are true unities and indivisible essences. Time and space have not the principle of their being, either in themselves, or in a fundamental and irreducible law of the mind; they are simply the necessary forms of every concrete existence in the phenomenal order; and the principle which produces them is life. That which is one could not be abstract; in the law which creates out of a metaphysical unity a phenomenal plurality there is real dynamic force. Time and space are then, metaphysically, forces, having power and life. They are but two aspects, not of movement, but of a living, organized being, primordial and absolute, causa sui. Time and space are in and through the organisms. We may say, therefore, life and space and time are one and the same thing. Empirical time and space presuppose, as the fundamental principle of their own nature, metaphysical time and space; while metaphysical time and space necessarily give empirical time and space. In order that a thing be in space, it is necessary that space be