Some philosophers have supposed
that we must be endowed by nature with the conception of Time, before we
begin to exercise our senses; but the difficulty would be to deprive us
of that adjunct without extinguishing our mental nature. Give us
sensibility, and you cannot withhold the element of Time. The
supposition of Kant and others, that it is implanted in us as an empty
form, before we begin to employ our senses upon things, is needless; for
as soon as we move, see, hear, think, are pleased or pained, we create
time. And our notion of Time in general is exactly what these
sensibilities make it, only enlarged by our constructive power already
spoken of.
[MATTER AND VOID SUPPLEMENTARY.]
While all our senses and feelings give us time, it is our experience of
Motion and Resistance,--the energetic or active side of our nature
alone,--that gives us Space. The simplest feature of Space is the
alternation of Resistance and Non-Resistance, of obstructed motion and
freedom to move. The hand presses dead upon an obstacle; the obstacle
gives way and allows free motion; these two contrasting experiences are
the elements of the two contrasting facts--Matter and Space. By none of
the five senses, in their pure and proper character as senses, can we
obtain these experiences; and hence at an earlier stage of inquiry into
the mind, when our knowledge-giving sensibilities were referred to the
five senses, there was no adequate account of the notion of Space or
Extension. Space includes more than this simple contrast of the
resisting and the non-resisting; it includes what we call the
Co-existing or Contemporaneous, the great aggregate of the outspread
world, as existing at any moment, a somewhat complicated attainment,
which I am not now specially concerned with. It sufficiently illustrates
the limitation of our knowledge by our sensibilities, from the nature of
space, to fasten attention on the double and mutually supplementing
experience of Matter and Void; the one resisting movement, and giving
the consciousness of resistance, or dead strain, the other permitting
movement, and giving the consciousness of the unobstructed sweep of the
limbs or members. Whatever else may be in space, this freedom to move,
to soar, to expatiate (in contrast to being hemmed in, obstructed, held
fast), is an essential part of the conception, and is formed out of our
active or moving sensibilities. Now, as far as movement is concerned, we
must be in one of two states;--we must be putting forth energy without
effecting movement, being met by obstacles called matter; or we must be
putting forth energy unresisted and effecting movement, which is what we
mean by empty space. There is no third position in the matter of putting
forth our active energy. Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there
is space; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter.
We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a
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