Science and the Infinite; or, Through a Window in the Blank WallKlein, Sydney T. (Sydney Turner)
Religion
Science and the Infinite; or, Through a Window in the Blank Wall
Klein, Sydney T. (Sydney Turner)
Religion and science
We have seen that our very thoughts, and therefore consciousness of
living, are limited by Time and Space, but we cannot with the utmost
endeavour conceive a limit to Time and Space; they are two twin
sisters, alike in many respects but different in others, and we shall
realise later on that they are readily interchangeable. The sensuous
aspect of Motion is, as we have seen, the time that an object takes to
go over a certain space--namely, what is called the rate at which it
passes from one point to another, and we cannot imagine Motion unless
it contains both of these modes in however small a quantity; we may
have the greatest imaginable space traversed in a moment of time, or
the smallest imaginable space covered in what may be called, for want
of a better word, an eternity, but we still have to postulate what we
call Motion; this, of course, follows from the fact that our thoughts
require both these modes for forming concepts. If we compare our
conception of Matter with that of Time and Space, we see that the two
latter are not separately the object of any sense, but are the modes
or conditions under which all our senses act, to a greater or less
degree, and these conditions cannot therefore carry the same
impression of objectivity to our senses as Matter does, except perhaps
in the sense that all physical phenomena are simply motion, and motion
is the product of both of these limitations but not of either of them
separately.
If we analyse our conceptions of Time and Space we seem forced to
postulate that they are both infinitely divisible and infinitely
extensible; they are both what is called continuous and not discrete,
we cannot conceive any minimum in their division; both duration in
Time and extension in Space can be reduced, as it were, to a
mathematical point; nor can we conceive any maximum in either duration
or extension. They are both therefore comprised in every conception
possible to our consciousness; all parts of Time are time and all
parts of Space are space; there are no holes, as it were, in Space
which are not space, nor intervals in Time which are not time, they
are both complete units; Space cannot be limited except by space, and
Time cannot be limited except by time. So far they are alike, but, on
the other hand, Space is comprised of three dimensions--namely,
length, breadth, and depth, whereas Time has the appearance to us of
comprising one dimension only--namely, length.
Under our present conditions we can only think of one finite subject
at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled. We
can therefore only think of points in Time and Space as situated
beyond, or in front of, other fixed points, which again must be
followed by other points; we cannot fix a point in either so as to
exclude the thought of a point beyond; we can only in fact examine
them in a form of finite sequences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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