SPACE AND TIME 185 



the sequence of phenomena, there time ceases for me 

 because I no longer require it to distinguish an order of 

 events. Let the reader endeavour to reah'se empty time, 

 or time with no sequence of events, and he will soon be 

 ready to grant that time is a mode of his own perception 

 and is limited by the contents of his experience.^ Thus 

 the moments devoted to wonder over the eternities of 

 time are as ill -spent as those consumed in pondering 

 on the immensities of space (p. 157). They are like 

 moments employed in examining the frame of a picture 

 and not its contents, in admiring the constitution of the 

 artist's canvas and not his genius. The frame is just 

 large and strong enough to support the picture, the 

 canvas is just wide and stout enough to sustain the 

 artist's colours. But frame and canvas are only modes 

 by which the artist brings home his idea to us, and our 

 wonder should not be for them, but for the contents of 

 the picture and its author. So it is with time and space 

 — these are but the frame and the canvas by aid of 

 which the perceptive faculty displays our experience. 

 Our admiration is due not to them, but to the complex 

 contents of perception, to the extraordinary discriminat- 

 ing power of the human perceptive faculty. The com- 

 plexity of nature is conditioned by our perceptive faculty ; 

 the comprehensive character of natural law is due to the 

 ingenuity of the human mind. Here, in the human 

 powers of perception and reason, lie the mystery and 

 the grandeur of nature and its laws. Those, whether 

 poets or materialists, who do homage to nature as the 

 sovereign of man, too often forget that the order and 

 complexity they admire are at least as much a product of 

 man's perceptive and reasoning faculties as are their own 

 memories and thoughts. 



1 It may well be questioned whether anything that falls outside human 

 experience can be said to have existed in perceptual time. Such time is 

 essentially the mode by which we distinguish an immediate sense-impression 

 from a succession of stored sense-impresses (p. 41). That the world has 

 existed for 60,000,000 years is a eonceptioii, and the period referred to a 

 conceptual rather than a perceptual one. The. future also is a notion attach- 

 ing rather to conceptual than to perceptual time. The full discussion of these 

 points cannot, however, be entered upon at this stage. 



