Elements of metaphysicsTaylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Philosophy
Elements of metaphysics
Taylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Metaphysics
Similarly, if there are intelligent purposes of which our human
purposive life is debarred from taking account as such, as we urged that
there must be behind the phenomenal physical order, the time and space
within which those purposes are conceived and executed would have no
place in _our_ spatial and temporal system. The phenomenal events of the
physical order would fall within our system, but not the life of inner
purpose of which that order is the manifestation to our senses.
Ultimately, in fact, all spaces and all times could only form one
spatial and temporal system on condition that the infinite absolute
experience views all its contents in spatial and temporal form; then the
various space and time systems corresponding to the purposes of the
various groups of finite individuals would finally, for the infinite
individual, form one great system of time and space relations. But we
have already seen that the infinite experience cannot comprehend its
contents in spatial or temporal forms.
We infer, then, that there may be—indeed, if our interpretation of the
physical order is valid, there must be—a plurality of spaces and times
within the Real. Within any one such space or time all its members are
spatially and temporally interrelated, but the various spaces are not
themselves related in space, nor the various times before or after one
another in time. Their relation is the purely logical one of being
varying modes of the expression in a finite detail of the underlying
nature of the ultimate Reality.[152] For the absolute experience they
must be all at once and together, not in the sense of being in “one
space and time,” but in the sense of forming together the systematic
embodiment of one coherent ground or principle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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