Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/195

 character of time does not depend on the modern doctrine of relativity, and holds equally — and indeed, more simply — if this doctrine be abandoned. It does depend on the analysis of the intrinsic character of an event, considered as the most concrete finite entity.

In reviewing this argument, note first that the second quotation from Kant, on which it is based, does not depend on any peculiar Kantian doctrine. The latter of the two is in agreement with Plato as against Aristotle. In the second place, the argument assumes that Zeno understated his argument. He should have urged it against the current notion of time in itself, and not against motion, which involves relations between time and space. For, what becomes has duration. But no duration can become until a smaller duration (part of the former) has antecedently come into being [Kant’s earlier statement]. The same argument applies to this smaller duration, and so on. Also the infinite regress of these durations converges to nothing — and even on the Aristotelian view there is no first moment. Accordingly time would be an irrational notion. Thirdly, in the epochal theory Zeno’s difficulty is met by conceiving temporalisation as the realisation of a complete organism. This organism is an event holding in its essence its spatio-temporal relationships (both within itself, and beyond itself) throughout the spatio-temporal continuum.