IV
Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.
We have already[[481]] shown the decisive importance of the depth-experience, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul. The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that adds depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. “Cogito, ergo sum” is simply the formulation of the depth-experience—I cognize, and therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical visual polarity of Matter and Form.
But it follows from this that in the known there can be no reappearance of living time. For this has already passed into the known, into constant “existence,” as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness) and extension are identical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of direction. The application of the word “time” to the imaginary and measurable time-dimension of physics is a mistake. The only question is whether it is possible or not to avoid the mistake. If one substitutes the word “Destiny” for “time” in any physical enunciation, one feels at once that pure Nature does not contain Time. The form-world of physics extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion extend, and we have seen that (notwithstanding Kant) there is not and cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number and Time. And yet this is controverted by the fact of motion in the picture of the world-around. It is the unsolved and unsolvable problem of the Eleatics—being (or thinking) and motion are incompatible; motion “is” not (is only “apparent”).
And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole, which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the other hand—i.e., the observing Reason—must separate them. The livingly-experienced “in-itself,” mentally emancipated from the act of the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now “Nature,” something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the knowledge of Nature is an activity of measurement. All the same, we live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing lives with us. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it not merely from moment to moment is, but in a continuous flow with and around us becomes, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its world. This element is called movement, and it contradicts Nature as a picture, but it represents the history of this picture. And therefore, as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances (“things”[[482]]), so also physical “time” is abstracted from the impression of motion.
Physics investigates Nature, and consequently it knows time only as a length. But the physicist lives in the midst of the history of this Nature, and therefore he is forced to conceive motion as a mathematically determinable magnitude, as a concretion of the pure numbers obtained in the experiment and written down in formulæ. “Physics,” says Kirchhoff, “is the complete and simple description of motions.” That indeed has always been its object. But the question is one not of motions in the picture but of motions of the picture. Motion, in the Nature of physics, is nothing else but that metaphysical something which gives rise to the consciousness of a succession. The known is timeless and alien to motion; its state of becomeness implies this. It is the organic sequence of knowns that gives the impression of a motion. The physicist receives the word as an impression not upon “reason” but upon the whole man, and the function of that man is not “Nature” only but the whole world. And that is the world-as-history. “Nature,” then, is an expression of the Culture in each instance.[[483]] All physics is treatment of the motion-problem—in which the life-problem itself is implicit—not as though it could one day be solved, but in spite of, nay because of, the fact that it is insoluble. The secret of motion awakens in man the apprehension of death.[[484]]
If, then, Nature-knowledge is a subtle kind of self-knowledge—Nature understood as picture, as mirror of man—the attempt to solve the motion-problem is an attempt of knowledge to get on the track of its own secret, its own Destiny.