We may state the difficulty thus: (1) Causation cannot possibly be thought of as discontinuous, _i.e._ as the sequence of one distinct event upon an assemblage of other events without gross contradiction. To think of it as discontinuous, we must conceive the _cause_ A to exist first in its completeness, and then to be suddenly followed by the effect B. (That the cause A consists of a number of conditions, _a_, _b_, _c_ ... which themselves come into existence successively, and that A is not there until the last of these conditions has been realised, makes no difference to the principle.) Now this seems to be what is actually implied by the language of those inductive logicians who insist that in all Causation the cause must _precede_ the effect. But what can such precedence mean? It can only mean that after the complete realisation of the conditions included in the cause A, there must intervene a space of empty time _before_ the effect B enters on the scene. However brief and “momentary” you take this gap in the stream of events to be, the gap must be there if your language about the cause as being _before_ the effect is to have any meaning. For if there is no such gap, and the entrance of B is simultaneous with the complete realisation of its conditions A, it is no longer true to say that the cause A is _before_ the effect B. A does not exist as A until _a_, _b_, _c_ ... are all present, and as soon as they are present B is present too. And thus the relation between A and B is not that of the sequence of a later event on an earlier. They are actually _together_. In fact, the doctrine that the cause precedes the effect rests upon the notion that the time-series is one in which each member has a next term. And this seems inconceivable. For not only can you subdivide any finite time, however small, into two mutually exclusive parts, but the point at which the division is effected is itself a moment in the time-series lying _between_ the beginning and the end of the original interval. Time therefore must be continuous, and if causation is not equally continuous, we must suppose that gaps of empty time are what separate the first event, the cause, from the subsequent event, the effect. Yet _if_ this could be regarded as a defensible doctrine on other grounds, it would then follow that the assemblage of events A is not the totality of conditions requisite for the occurrence of B. The “totality of conditions,” _i.e._ the _cause_ as previously defined, would be the events A _plus_ a certain lapse of empty time.[106] And so the cause would once more turn out not to precede the effect, or we should have to suppose the end of the interval of empty time included in it as separated from the beginning of B by a second lapse, and so on indefinitely.