FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 183 



pair that I now mean is Time and Space, which, though not ob- 

 viously antinomic, yet owes its existence, as can now be shown, 

 to that profoundest of concept-contrasts which we earlier considered 

 under the head of Subject and Object, when the Object takes on its 

 only adequate form of Other Subject. But in passing from the con- 

 trast One and Many towards its rational transformation into the 

 moral society of Mind and Companion Minds, we break into this 

 pair of Time and Space, and must make our way through it by 

 taking in its full meaning. 



Time and Space play an enormous part in all our empirical thinking, 

 our actual use of thought in our sense-perceptive life. And no wonder; 

 for, in cooperation, they form the postulate and condition of all our 

 possible sensuous consciousness. Only on them as backgrounds can 

 thought take on the peculiar clearness of an image or a picture; only 

 on the screens which they supply can we literally depict an object. 

 And this clarity of outline and boundary is so dear to our ordinary 

 consciousness, that we are prone to say there is no sufficient, no real 

 clearness, unless we can clarify by the bounds either of place or of 

 date, or of both. In this mood, we are led to deny the reality and 

 validity of thought altogether, when it cannot be defined in the metes 

 and bounds afforded by Time or by Space: that which has no date 

 nor place, we say, no extent and no duration, cannot be real; 

 it is but a pseudo-thought, a pretense and a delusion. Here is the 

 extremely plausible foundation of the philosophy known as sensa- 

 tionism, the refined or second-thought form of materialism, in which 

 it begins its euthanasia into idealism. 



Without delaying here to criticise this, let us notice the part that 

 Time and Space play in reference to the conceptual pair we last con- 

 sidered, the One and the Many; for not otherwise shall we find our 

 way beyond them to the still more fundamental conceptions which 

 we are now aiming to reach. Indeed, it is through our surface-appre- 

 hension of the pair One and Many, as this illumines experience, that 

 we most naturally come at the pair Time and Space; so that these are 

 at first taken for mere generalizations and abstractions, the purely 

 nominal representatives of the actual distinctions between the mem- 

 bers of the Many by our sense-perception of this from that, of here 

 from there, of now from then. It is not till our reflective attention is 

 fixed on the fact that there and here, now and then, are peculiar dis- 

 tinctions, wholly different from other contrasts of this with that, 

 which may be made in all sorts of ways, by difference of quality, or of 

 quantity, or of relations quite other than place and date, it is not 

 till we realize this peculiar character of the Time-contrast and the 

 Space-contrast, that we see these singular differential qualia cannot 

 be derived from others, not even from the contrast One and Many, 

 but are independent, are themselves underived and spontaneous 



