i UNORGANIZED BODIES 9 



cause able to restore everything to its place. This 

 amounts to saying that any state of the group may be 

 repeated as often as desired, and consequently that the 

 group does not grow old. It has no history. 



Thus nothing is created therein, neither form nor 



O 



matter. What the group will be is already present in 

 what it is, provided u what it is &quot; includes all the points 

 of the universe with which it is related. A superhuman 

 intellect could calculate, for any moment of time, the 

 position of any point of the system in space. And as 

 there is nothing more in the form of the whole than 

 the arrangement of its parts, the future forms of the 

 system are theoretically visible in its present con 

 figuration. 



All our belief in objects, all our operations on the 

 systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea 

 that time does not bite into them. We have touched 

 on this question in an earlier work, and shall return to 

 it in the course of the present study. For the moment, 

 we will confine ourselves to pointing out that the 

 abstract time / attributed by science to a material 

 object or to an isolated system consists only in a certain 

 number of simultaneities or more generally of corre 

 spondences, and that this number remains the same, 

 whatever be the nature of the intervals between the 

 correspondences. With these intervals we are never 

 concerned when dealing with inert matter ; or, if they 

 are considered, it is in order to count therein fresh 

 correspondences, between which again we shall not care 

 what happens. Common sense, which is occupied 

 with detached objects, and also science, which considers 

 isolated systems, are concerned only with the ends of the 

 intervals and not with the intervals themselves. There 

 fore the flow of time might assume an infinite rapidity, 



