permeate each other.1

We must distinguish between the multiplicity of juxtaposition and of interpenetration." That, too, is a vague vision of

the great truth that time has no parts. But like Herbart in a similar case, Bergson fails to see that interpenetration presupposes extension or space, that only things can melt into and permeate each other. (3) Another point argued at great length is, that duration not being extended in space is immeasurable. When I try to measure time by watching the hands of a clock, "I do not measure duration as seems to be thought. I merely count simultaneities, which is very different." The fallacy there lies in failing to see that space in itself is just as immeasurable as time in itself. We know them both only through their effects, that is, through the spatial and temporal relations of things. In the one case we measure not pure space, but the distance and dimensions of things; in the other case, not pure duration, but temporal periods-hours, days, years, etc.—are measured by the motions of things. (4) But this theory of time as a double-headed monster grows still more absurd when it tries to account for motion. It claims that motion has two elements, the space traversed and the act of traversing it; of these elements the first is divisible and the second indivisible. In both cases the exact opposite is the truth. Space, as I have demonstrated, is continuous or in

'Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 104, 164, 231, 237, etc. 'Ibid., p. 75, note.

'Ibid.,

p. 108.

divisible. The act of traversing it is divisible into as many steps as we choose.

By means of such fallacies Bergson pretends to prove human freedom; but of this more hereafter. Here I seek only to show that the contradictions infesting the time-concept are due to a false conception of time-mainly to a confusing of time with the temporal relations of things. In the previous chapters the space concept was similarly explained. These contradictions thus eliminated, the proof of realism given in Chapter IV. is perfected. The denial of the world in space and time is tantamount to utter nihilism; it involves the complete collapse and extinction of thought.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONCEPT

Section I. Plato's View

FEW events in history are more memorable than the discovery begun by Socrates and completed by Plato that concepts essentially signify the unchanging and the causal. It was not only a great truth, but also a deep-hidden one. It was a truth contradicted by all appearances. In the first place the

double import of the concept-its intension and extension-imparted to it an air of ambiguity and incoherence which the thought of twenty-three centuries has not been able to dispel: philosophy ever since Plato's day has been little more than an endless dispute between Realists, Conceptualists and Nominalists concerning this complex mystery of the concept. And the second feature of the concept has been a still greater embarrassment. For, it seems a flat contradiction of the first feature. If the concept is static, immutable, eternally quiescent, how can it be an active cause? And yet there it stands— the definition given by Xenocrates of the Platonic concept "a cause serving as the unchanging type of all natural things." It was an immortal discovery. Nor is it in any wise a blot upon Plato's genius that his insight was not altogether clear and perfect. For in the then state of knowledge, as I shall show, it was impossible for any finite

intellect to fully and finally interpret this Platonic vision.

But what was then impossible the progress of science has now rendered perfectly feasible. What barred Plato from fully comprehending his splendid vision was the crude pre-scientific view of the relation of the attributes to the thing as one of mere “inherence”—“occult qualities" within the thing. It was this view which Aristotle, that grand master of compromise, so shrewdly elaborated in his doctrine of universals in rem, opposing it to the Platonic doctrine of universals ante rem. I have already shown that this inherence theory renders any true knowledge either of the thing or its attributes impossible, and leads straight to illusionism. Still truer is this in regard to the more complicated case of the concept or kind. For there is an evident connection of some sort between the qualities and the object qualified; to deny that would be sheer idiocy. But there is no such obvious connection between the sets of attributes belonging severally to different individuals of the same kind or class. Hence theorists, whatever their school, have failed to find any unifying bond between these sets of attributes, except that of mere resemblance or similarity. And this feeling of resemblance, as I have repeatedly shown, is strictly no relation at all; taken solely by itself, it is but the embryo-still-born-of a relation. It is the very type of all incoherence and self-contradiction; everything is at once like and not like everything else. And precisely here is the secret of that endless,

1

triangular controversy between realists, nominalists and concepticalists. No one of them has ever been able to explain the specific or generic relationship between the individuals forming a class, except by the utterly absurd and unintelligible dictum that there was somehow "a common element" in them. All have fallen back upon the Fallacy of Resemblance, and that is self-contradiction incarnate.

All schools, I say, without exception. The Scottish philosophy of "common sense," with its short and easy method of "intuitions," the French and English empiricism, the Teutonic illusionism in all its varied phases of paradox-all are mired in this fallacy of resemblance, this nonsense of a common element in different things. Listen first to an able and eminent intuitionalist: "Herein lies the difference between the act of the brute and the act of a man in perceiving objects that are alike. In one sense the brute may perceive what is similar as readily as a man; in some cases even more quickly, for his senses may be more keen. . . . But the brute does not attend and analyze as does a man. Hence he cannot discriminate, so as to abstract; or, at best, the degree and range of such efforts must be very limited. His power to compare and discern the like and the unlike would for this reason be lame and feeble, if no other could be suggested. Should it be granted that the brute can discern similar attributes, it has no power at all to conceive or think the similar as the same.

991

1Porter, Intellectual Science, p. 331.