64 SCEPTICISM. 



would peep through our apparently objective 

 measurements. 



And is not a further fiction involved in the 

 measurement of Time at all ? For our measure- 

 ment is, and must be, in terms of the discrete, 

 whereas that which we attempt to measure is 

 continuous, one, and indivisible by our arbitrary 

 partitions. 



Again, Time is infinite, and yet science treats it 

 as though it were finite : we fancy that the past 

 explains the present ; Time has no beginning, and 

 yet we search the past for the origins of things : 

 the world of which science is the knowledge cannot 

 'have existed from all time, and yet a beginning of 

 the world in Time is impossible. 



Our real consciousness of Time conflicts at every 

 point with the treatment of Time required in science, 

 and this conflict culminates as a contradiction in 

 terms in the insoluble antinomy of the completed 

 infinity of past Time. For the original and only 

 valid meaning of infinity is that which can never 

 be completed by the addition of units, and yet we 

 undoubtedly regard the past infinity as completed 

 by the present. 



§ 7. Nor do we fare any better when we com- 

 pare our conception of Space with the reality : its 

 infinite extent and divisibility cannot be forced into 

 the scheme of science. An infinite and infinitely 

 divisible world Is not an object of knowledge ; so 

 science postulates the atom at the one, and the 

 "confines of the universe" at the other extreme, 

 as the limits of Space, in order to obtain definite 

 quantities which can be calculated. And yet we 

 can conceive neither how the atom should be in- 

 capable of further division, nor how the extent of 



