Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
Bergson’s solution of Zeno’s paradoxes is another detail of this
chapter which is of a good deal of interest; but it applies no new
principle to the support of the impossibility of counting psychic
facts. Without a clearer conception of the commerce or intersection
between time and space, which he characterizes only by the name
of “simultaneity,” his reply to Zeno leaves the question of the
divisibility of time as problematic as ever. Achilles out-strips the
tortoise, he says, “because each of Achilles’ steps and each of the
tortoise’s steps are indivisible acts in so far as they are movements,
and are different magnitudes in so far as they are space.”[114] They
are indivisible in the same sense in which a living organism is
indivisible: if you divide them, no division _is_ a part of that which
_was_. But the trouble is that they _are divisible_ also in the same
sense in which the organism is divisible. It is the most extravagant
of assumptions that analysis of a living body into right and left
etc.--which, to be sure, is serviceable to activity upon it--is,
because of its service to action, not a character of the object itself.
And of motion the same sort of analysis is a patent fact of experience:
there is an earlier, middle and latter phase. The possibility of this
patent fact is the crux of the problem. No extant answer to Zeno is
satisfactory to everybody. I shall refer the reader to Professor
Fullerton’s treatment of the paradoxes, in Chapter XI of his _System of
Metaphysics_, as the solution which seems to me to be at the same time
the most closely related of any that I know, to Bergson’s, and free of
Bergson’s error. Bergson’s solution has at least this element of truth,
that Zeno confuses the space traversed with something else concerned
in every case of motion. Fullerton makes a distinction between any
actual experience of space or time, and the possibility of indefinitely
magnified substitutes for such experience; and shows a way in which
motion can be relegated to the former (“apparent” space) and denied to
the latter (“real” space) without either denying reality to motion or
infinite divisibility to real space and time.
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