And Mr. Spalding found himself in a white-washed room, scantily furnished with three rows of bookshelves, a writing-table, a table set with mysterious instruments, and two chairs. A shaded lamp on the writing-table gave light. Mr. Spalding had left the umbrella pine country blazing with sunlight, but it seemed that Kant’s time was somewhere about ten o’clock at night. The large window was bared to a dark-blue sky of stars. A little, middle-aged man sat at the writing-table. He wore eighteenth-century clothes and a tie wig. The face that looked up at Mr. Spalding was lean and dried, the mouth tight, the eyes shining distantly with a deep, indrawn intelligence. Mr. Spalding understood that he was in the presence of Immanuel Kant. “You thought me up?” “Forgive me. I am James Spalding, a student of philosophy. I was told that you might, perhaps, be willing to explain to me the—the very extraordinary conditions in which I find myself.” “May I ask, Mr. Spalding, if you have paid any particular attention to _my_ philosophy?” “I am one of your most devoted disciples, sir. I refuse to believe that philosophy has made any considerable advance since the Critique of Pure Reason.” “T-t-t. My successor, Hegel, made a very considerable advance. If you have neglected Hegel—” “Pardon me, I have not. I was once Hegel’s devoted disciple. An entrancing fantasy, the Triple Dialectic. But I came to see that yours, sir, was the safer and the saner system, and that the recurrent tendency of philosophy must be back to Kant.” “Better say Forward with him. If you are indeed my disciple, I do not think that conditions here should have struck you as extraordinary.” “They struck me as an extraordinary confirmation of your theory of space and time, sir.” “They are that. They are that. But they go far beyond anything I ever dreamed of. It was not in my scheme that the Will—to which, if you remember, I gave a purely ethical and pragmatical rôle—that the Will and the imagination of individuals, of you and me, Mr. Spalding, should create their own space and time, and their own objects in space and time. I did not anticipate this multiplicity of spaces and times. In my time there was only one space and one time for everybody. “Still, it is a very remarkable confirmation, and you may imagine, Mr. Spalding, that I was gratified when I first came here to find everybody talking and thinking correctly about time and space. You will have noticed that here we say state, meaning state of consciousness, where we used to say place. In the same way we talk about states of time, meaning time as a state of consciousness. My present state, you will observe, is exactly ten minutes past ten by my clock, which is my consciousness. My consciousness registers time automatically. My own time, mind you, not other people’s.”