A _systematic_ delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny. II The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far as it affects the subject of this book. The _word_ Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal something designated earlier as the “proper,” which with an inner certainty we oppose to the “alien” something that is borne in upon each of us amongst and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life. “The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words. The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission has never even been noticed. But what _is_ time as a length, time without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,” direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry than in prose—has this _organic_ essence, while Space has not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring Time _with Space_ under one general Critique. Space is a _conception_, but time is a _word_ to indicate something inconceivable, a sound- symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.