SPACE, TIME 283 



continuous. In the first place, they exhibit no natural 

 divisions; time does not pass in pulsations or in rhythms, 

 and space possesses no fences. Though space and time are 

 both quantitative, i.e., they permit the comparison of incre- 

 ments according to the relation greater than, there is nothing 

 in either space or time to suggest that they prefer one unit 

 to another. Time does not proceed by jumps or ticks, but 

 without rhythms; and space is unbroken by any natural 

 lines of division. In this sense space and time may be said 

 to be amorphous, since they offer no metrics; they exhibit 

 no structure by which one part of space may be compared 

 with another, or an earlier duration compared with a later 

 one. Hence measurement in both space and time must 

 take place by means of material objects and processes, 

 more or less arbitrarily selected from a wide range of candi- 

 dates. And their use implies measurement not of space 

 and time as such, but merely of further material objects 

 and processes located elsewhere in space and time. By the 

 continuity of space and time in this sense is meant simply 

 their unbrokenness ; they are continuous in the same way 

 that a London fog or a tropical sky is continuous. Any point 

 represents a potentiality of division, but no such actual 

 divisions are to be found. 



In the second place, space and time may be said to be 

 continuous in the technical sense of the linear continuum, 

 defined in the preceding chapter. The order of instants in 

 time and of points in space is that of the continuous rather 

 than that of the discrete series. A discrete series is lumpy 

 and atomic, with minimum elements between which strict 

 adjacency holds; a continuum exhibits no such indivisibles, 

 for between any two there is an infinity of others. A dis- 

 crete series is empirically illustrated by a chain; but a 

 continuum has no empirical illustration, for perceptual events 

 exhibit only a finite divisibility. Hence one is obliged to 

 resort to conceptual examples. The continuity of space 

 and time are of the same kind as that exhibited by the 

 series of real numbers. Accordingly, one may say that space 



