Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/133

114 indeed supposed to be connected in the general causal order of the universe, and so are not wholly independent, we happen not to know what this causal connection is. Or again, even if one talks of pure chance, and ignores causal linkage, one has indeed to observe that any two physical events are viewed as occurring in the same space, and in the same time, or perhaps in the case of the same dice. One has also to admit that all parts of space, and all moments of time, are, in a sense, conceptually interdependent. For you cannot conceive a cubic foot of space destroyed, without abstracting from all space; nor can you suppose this hour to vanish wholly from the time stream without abolishing all time. But if space and time are thus Wholes of conceptually linked and mathematically interdependent parts, of course one has to admit that, in a sense, no two objects, no two events, in space and in time, can be defined as through and through logically or essentially independent of each other; since in defining each as to its time and space relations, one has to take account of facts which can be recognized only as mathematically linked with the space and time aspects of the other object or event. Yet, nevertheless, in the theory of probabilities, one still calls two events that occur in the same space and time, or even in the repeated throwing of the same dice, independent events. Plainly then, one merely means that while these events are not wholly independent, there is an aspect in which they may be called independent, either because one does not know what the interdependence is, or because knowing, one ignores some aspect of the interdependence as insignificant.

Now Realism usually also admits, even while it speaks