A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing
intellect solely. The times directly _felt_ in the experiences of
living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar
melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the
time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows
how long or how short it feels to the sugar? All _felt_ times coexist
and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice
of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal
confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale,
the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may
be resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out
the aboriginal privacy and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as
it were, and by each other. The notion of one objective and 'evenly
flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we
cut the processes of nature. They are now definitely contemporary,
or later or earlier one than another, and we can handle them
mathematically, as we say, and far better, practically as well as
theoretically, for having thus correlated them one to one with each
other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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