Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/599

No. 5.]

The tendency to regard continuity as an idea of prime importance in philosophy may be conveniently termed synechism. What synechism is and what it leads to, may be brought out by comment on the formula of mental action. Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there is but one law of mind; namely, that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of effectibility. The value of this law becomes apparent in view of the difficulties presented by the common theory of association of ideas. We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another. But taking the word 'idea' in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot be compared. All relation, being between ideas, can exist only in some consciousness; now that past idea was in no consciousness but that past consciousness that alone contained it; and that did not embrace the vicarious idea. Then, since we may not jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present, the conviction comes that it must be present by direct perception. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected with the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps. The suggestion that consciousness necessarily embraces an interval of time is not tenable, if a finite time be meant. For if the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then, on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. All that is requisite is that we should be immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time. In this infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Now, upon this interval follows another, whose beginning is the middle of the former and whose middle is the end of the former. From the immediate perception of these two intervals we gain a mediate, or inferential, perception of the relation of all four instants. Now let there be not only an indefinite succession of these inferential acts of comparative perception, but a continuous flow of inference through a finite time, and the result will be a mediate consciousness of the whole time in the last moment.

One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it gives time a definite direction of flow from past to future, so that the