simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the flux that goes
from one to another. The proof of this is that I can, at discretion,
vary the rapidity of the flux of the universe in regard to a
consciousness that is independent of it and that would perceive the
variation by the quite qualitative _feeling_ that it would have of it:
whatever the variation had been, since the movement of T would
participate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in my
equations nor in the numbers that figure in them.
Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the flux becomes
infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages of this book, that the
trajectory of the mobile T is given at once, and that the whole history,
past, present and future, of the material universe is spread out
instantaneously in space. The same mathematical correspondences will
subsist between the moments of the history of the world unfolded like a
fan, so to speak, and the divisions T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line
which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of
science nothing will have changed. But if, time thus spreading itself
out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has nothing
to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells
us, it takes account neither of _succession_ in what of it is specific
nor of _time_ in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to
express what strikes our consciousness in succession and duration. It no
more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges
thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows
under their arches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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