is not and cannot be internally understood to qualify the system, the system would have to be in the completest sense all-inclusive and exhaustive. Any unknown conditions, such as I have admitted, on p. 535, would have to be impossible. But for myself I cannot believe that such knowledge is within our grasp; and, so far as pleasure is concerned, I have to end with a result the opposite of which I cannot call completely impossible.
p. 206. In what I have said here about the sense of Time, I am not implying that in my view it is there from the first. On the contrary I think the opposite is more probable; but I saw no use in expressing an opinion.
Chapter xviii. The main doctrines put forward in this Chapter and in Chapter iv, have been criticised incidentally by Professor Watson in the Philosophical Review for July and September 1895. In these articles I have to my regret often found it impossible to decide where Professor Watson is criticising myself, or some other writer, and where again he is developing something which he takes to be more or less our common property. And where he is plainly criticising myself, I cannot always discover the point of the criticism. Hence what follows must be offered as subject to some doubt.
The main doctrine to which I am committed, and which Professor Watson certainly condemns, is the regarding Time “as not an ultimate or true determination of reality but a ‘mere appearance.’”[1] Professor Watson, with some other critics, has misunderstood the words ‘mere appearance.’[2] The point he wishes to make, I presume, is this, that everything determines Reality in its own place and degree, and therefore everything has its truth. And I myself have also laid stress on this point. But, agreeing so far, Professor Watson and myself seem to differ as follows. Though he agrees that as a determination of Reality time is inadequate and partial and has to be corrected by something more true, Professor Watson objects to my calling it not an ultimate or true determination, and he denies that it is self-contradictory and false. Now here I have to join issue. I deny that time or anything else could possibly be inadequate, if it were not self-contradictory. And I would ask, If this or any other determination is a true and consistent one, how are we to take on ourselves to correct it? This doctrine of a merely external correction of what is not false, and this refusal to admit the internal inconsistency of lower points of view, though we have to attribute it to Professor Watson, is certainly not explained by him. I venture however to think that some explanation is required, and in the absence of it I must insist both that time is inconsistent, and that, if it were not so, it would also not be
- ↑ Phil. Rev. p. 489.
- ↑ See above pp. 557-8.
