Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/251

] but also, and especially, for themselves, viz., phenomena of consciousness. It remains to show that the concept of repetition which belongs to this class of phenomena is necessarily the concept of 'altering repetition.' Internal experience proves this, for consciousness itself would be impossible without change. On the other hand, internal experience, being experience, implies permanence as well. Identity united throughout with diversity, permanence always accompanied by change, these are the conditions of reflective consciousness; hence the subject cannot consider the repetition of its states under any other aspect than that of change. Indeed, it exists for itself only by reason of this perpetual transformation. This expresses the principle of 'altering repetition.' What does the concept of time become from this point of view ? There can no longer be any question of a homogeneous, unilinear medium. The answer is to be found by the analysis of the conditions of the fact of consciousness, deduced from experience in general. The phenomenon for itself cannot be repeated without changing and finally disappearing. It follows that time, the order of succession of these phenomena, acts upon them immediately, i.e., time in relation to them is an active and not a homogeneous medium. Psychology, the science of 'ejects,' accommodates itself neither to integral repetition nor to geometrical time. It requires 'altering repetition' and psychological time. This second mode of conceiving time marks a progress of intelligence toward the concrete. It does not, like the first, shock our intimate sense of duration, which is one of the immediate data of consciousness.

Since Descartes, the problem of philosophy has been to harmonize our power of influencing events in the external world with the otherwise necessitated course of nature. It must be admitted that our percepts arise from some power inherent in ourselves. The entire world-realization is contained in our own conscious content, the activity of our hidden nature. The correct analysis of our conscious content would yield a true and complete knowledge of nature. This conscious content cannot arise within the body, as the Idealists suppose, for the body arises as an insignificant part of the conscious content. The conscious content arises fluently and in fragments as the activity of a hidden matrix. This inner being has power to