92 "BECOMING" 



enlightened outlook which you wish to substitute for 

 the first chapter of Genesis? If you genuinely believe 

 that a contra-evolutionary theory is just as true and as 

 significant as an evolutionary theory, surely it is time that 

 a protest should be made against the entirely one-sided 

 version currently taught. 



Dynamic Quality of the External World. But for our 

 ulterior conviction of the dynamic quality of time, it 

 would be possible to take the view that ''becoming" is 

 purely subjective — that there is no "becoming" in the 

 external world which lies passively spread out in the 

 time-dimension as Minkowski pictured it. My con- 

 sciousness then invents its own serial order for the sense 

 impressions belonging to the different view-points along 

 the track in the external world, occupied by the four- 

 dimensional worm who is in some mysterious way 

 Myself; and in focussing the sensations of a particular 

 view-point I get the illusion that the corresponding 

 external events are "taking place". I suppose that this 

 would be adequate to account for the observed phe- 

 nomena. The objections to it hinge on the fact that it 

 leaves the external world without any dynamic quality 

 intrinsic to it. 



It is useful to recognise how some of our most ele- 

 mentary reasoning tacitly assumes the existence of this 

 dynamic quality or trend; to eradicate it would almost 

 paralyse our faculties of inference. In the operation of 

 shuffling cards it seems axiomatic that the cards must 

 be in greater disarrangement at a later instant. Can 

 you conceive Nature to be such that this is not obviously 

 true? But what do we here mean by "later"? So far 

 as the axiomatic character of the conclusion is concerned 



