'260 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



'Hence theories which have reo^arded Time as an 

 illusion, as the phenomenal distortion of the Eternal, 

 have ultimately had to confess their inability to 

 assign any meaning to the course of events in Time, 

 and so arrived at despair, practical and theoretical, 

 with regard to the phenomenal world. For it is 

 evident that a process is necessarily in Time,^ and 

 involves a temporal connection between its suc- 

 cessive phases. Our dilemma then is this, that if 

 the reality of Time is denied, the whole meaning 

 and rationality of the world is destroyed at one 

 blow ; if it is admitted, we do not rid ourselves of 

 its infinity and its contradiction of itself and of 

 science. 



A clue out of the labyrinth may be found by 

 observing with Aristotle (Phys. IV. 223a) that our 

 consciousness of Time depends on the perception 

 of motion (^Kivrja-ig), I.e., on the changes, and the 

 regularity of the changes, in short, on the Becoming 

 of the world. Time, as the consciousness of suc- 

 cession, is not indeed, as we feel at first sight 

 tempted to assert, bound up with the permanence 

 of physical motions, by which we at present mea- 

 sure it, and regulate the subjective times of our 

 several consciousnesses (ch. iii. § 6) ; but it does 

 seem to depend upon our consciousness of Change 

 or Becoming in the wider sense, of which physical 

 motion is but a single example. If, therefore, there 

 were no change. Time would not exist for us, i.e., 

 would not exist at all. 



The question therefore arises whether we can 

 form a conception of a state in which change is 



1 A " logical process " is really a psychological one : the pro- 

 cess is only in the mind which traces the co-existing links of 

 logical necessity. Cp. ch. iii. § 15 s/. 



