20 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



evolution and heredity might be assumed to explain, 

 the attempt to explain by them the origin of our con- 

 sciousness of Time must fall under the ban of Kant's 

 saying. Time is presupposed in any association of 

 sensible items at all ; myriadfold is it presupposed 

 in the ever accumulating, ever consolidating associa- 

 tions in the drift of evolution. It is the indispen- 

 sable presupposition of our even figuring to ourselves 

 the process of evolution, and it cannot have been 

 transmitted to us except by having previously been 

 acquired somewhere among our progenitors, more or 

 less remote. W/icu did it cuter the strea)>i of evolu- 

 tion, and Jiozv f 



Strive as one may, there is no escape from Kant's 

 implication that not even evolution ^ can produce 

 Time in our consciousness — the perception of the 

 infinite possibility of succession. For Time is the 

 necessary presupposition without which evolving con- 

 sciousness could not have the groupings of succes- 

 sion, hardening evermore, that are supposed to lead 

 slowly on to the consciousness of Time as a neces- 

 sary and immutable condition of experience. There 

 is for the evolutionist no escape from Kant's 



^ Even the cosmic conception of evolution was perfectly familiar 

 to Kant. In fact, Kant was the first to expound it in grand detail 

 (in his Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens'), and 

 he therefore cannot have failed to include it mentally in his sweeping 

 assertion that there is a vicious circle in every attempt to found our 

 consciousness of Time on generalisation. 



