Once the word and concept Time enters, the ground for analysis and reasoning at once becomes very slippery. Mathematicians, physicists, etc., may feel that the expression is just a “well adapted one,” and they may not be very much inclined to look closer into it or attentively to analyse it. Theologians and metaphysicians probably will speculate a great deal about it vaguely, with undefined terms and incoherent [pg 212] ideas with incoherent results; which will not lead us toward a scientific or true solution, but will keep us away from the discovery of truth.
In the meantime two facts remain facts: namely, mathematicians and physicists have almost all agreed with Minkowski “that space by itself and time by itself, are mere shadows, and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.” The other fact—psychological fact—is that time exists psychologically by itself, undefined and not understood. One chief difficulty is always that humans have to sit in judgment upon their own case. The psychological time as such, is our own human time; scientific time as such, is also our own human time. Which one of them is the best concept—which one more nearly corresponds to the truth about “time”? What is time (if any) anyway? Until now we have gone from “Cosmos” to “Bios,” from “Bios” to “Logos,” now we are confronted with the fact that “Logos”—Intelligence—and Time-binding are dangerously near to akin to each other, or may be identical. Do we in this way approach or go back to “Cosmos”? Such are the crucial questions which arise out of this new concept of Man. One fact must be borne in mind, that “the principles of dynamics appeared first to us, as experimental truths; but we have been obliged to use them as definitions. It is by definition that force is equal to the product of mass by acceleration, or that action is equal to reaction.” (The Foundation of Science, by Henri Poincaré); and mathematics also has its whole foundation in a few axioms, “self evident,” but psychological facts. It must be noted that the time-binding energy—the higher or highest energies of man (one of its branches anyway, for sake of discrimination let us call it “M”) when it works properly, that is, mathematically, does not work psychologically but works abstractly: the higher the abstraction the less there is of the psychological element and the more there is, so to say, of the pure, impersonal time-binding [pg 213] energy (M). The definition of a man as a time-binder—a definition based on facts—suggests many reflections. One of them is the possibility that one of the functions of the time-binding energy in its pure form, in the highest abstraction (M), works automatically—machine-like, as it were, shaping correctly the product of its activity, but whether truly is another matter. Mathematics does not presume that its conclusions are true, but it does assert that its conclusions are correct; that is the inestimable value of mathematics. This becomes a very comprehensive fact if we approach and analyse the mathematical processes as some branch (M) of the time-binding process, which they are; then this process at once becomes impersonal and cosmic, because of the time-binding involved in it, no matter what time is (if there is such a thing as time).
Is the succession of cosmos, bios, logos, time-binding taking us right back to cosmos again? Now if we put psychological axioms into the time-binding apparatus, it will thrash out the results correctly, but whether the results are true is another question.
To be able to talk about these problems I have to introduce three new definitions, which are introduced only for practical purposes. It may happen that after some rewording these definitions may become scientific.
I will try to define “truth” and for this purpose I will divide the concept “truth” into three types:
(1) Psychological, or private, or relative truth, by which I will mean such conceptions of the truth as any one person possesses, but different from other types of truth (α1, α2, ... αn)
(2) Scientific truth (αs), by which I will mean a psychological truth when it is approved by the time-binding faculties or apparatus in the present stage of our development. This scientific truth represents the “bound-up-time” in our present knowledge; and finally,
(3) The absolute truth, which will be the final definition of a phenomenon based upon the final knowledge of primal causation valid in infinity.
For simplicity's sake I will use the signs α1, α2, ... αn for the “psychological,” “private,” or “relative” truths, between which, for the moment, I will not discriminate.
αs1, αs2, ... αsn, will be used for scientific truths, and finally αinfinity for the absolute truth valid in infinity.