this shows that it is not accidental, but intrinsic to the modus operandi of all systems of abstract metaphysics.
They cannot account for the time- factor in Reality, because they have ab initio incapacitated themselves from accounting for Time as for change, imperfection and particularity — for all indeed that differentiates the realities of our experience from the ideals of our thought. And their whole method of procedure rendered this result inevitable. They were systems of abstract truth, and based on the assumption on which the truth of abstraction rests[1]. They aimed at emancipating philosophy from the flux to which all human experience is subject, at interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but ‘eternally’ and independently of Time and Change. Such conceptions, naturally, could not be based upon probable inferences from the actual condition of the world at, or during, any time, but had to be derived from logical necessities arising out of the eternal nature of the human mind as such. Hence those conceptions were necessarily abstract, and among the things they abstracted from was the time-aspect of Reality.
Once abstracted from, the reference to Time could not, of course, be recovered, any more than the individuality of Reality can be deduced, when once ignored. The assumption is made that, in order to express the ‘truth’ about Reality, its “thisness,” individuality, change, and its immersion in a certain temporal and spatial environment may be neglected, and the timeless validity of a conception is thus substituted for the living, changing and perishing existence we contemplate. Now it is not my purpose here to dispute, or even to. examine, the correctness Qf that assumption itself What I wish here to point out is merely that it is unreasonable to expect from such premisses to arrive at a deductive justification of the very characteristics of Reality that have been excluded.
The true reason, then, why Hegelism can give no reason for the Time-process, ie. for the fact that the world is ‘in time,’ and changes continuously, is that it was constructed to give an account of the world irrespective of Time and Change. If you insist on having a system of eternal and immutable ‘truth,’ you can get it only by abstracting from those characteristics of Reality, which we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and change. But you must pay the price for a formula
- ↑ I have in this sentence purposely used “truth” in two senses, in order to emphasize a distinction, which is too often overlooked, between the conceptual interpretation of reality, which is truth in the narrower sense, and the validity or practical working of those conceptual symbols, which constitutes their truth in a wider sense. (See below, p. 40.)
