A Book of Exposition

by Homer Heath Nugent

As seen, nature and its laws would appear to us very different from what we find them now, with our present time perception.

Thus philosophy, mathematics, and physical science agree that space and time cannot be entities, but are conceptions of the human mind in its relation to nature. But what does this mean, and what conclusions follow from it?

The space of our conception is three-dimensional—that is, extended in three directions. For instance, the north-south direction, the east-west direction, and the up-down direction. Any place or "point" in space thus is located, relative to some other point, by giving its three distances from the latter, in three (arbitrarily chosen) directions.

Time has only one dimension—that is, extends in one direction only, from the past to the future—and a moment or "point" in time thus is located, with reference to another point in time, by one time distance.

But there is a fundamental difference between our space conception and our time conception, in that we can pass through time only in one direction, from the past to the future, while we can pass through space in any direction, from north to south, as well as from south to north—that is, time is irreversible, flows uniformly in one direction, while space is reversible, can be traversed in any direction. This means that when we enter a thing in space, as a house, we can approach it, pass through it, leave it, come back to it, and the thing therefore appears permanent to us, and we know, even when we have left the house and do not see it any more, that it still exists, and that we can go back to it again and enter it. Not so with time. On approaching a thing in time, an event such as a human life, it extends from a point in time—birth—over a length of time—the life—to an end point in time—death—just as the house in space extends from a point in space—say the north wall—over a length of space—its extent—to an end point in space—say the south wall. But when we pass beyond the end point of an event in time—the death of a life—we cannot go back to the event any more; the event has ceased, ended, the life is extinct.

But let us imagine that the same irreversibility applied to the conception of space—that is, that we could move through space only from north to south, and not in the opposite direction. Then a thing in space, as a house, would not exist for us until we approached it. When we were approaching it, it would first appear indistinctly, and more and more distinctly the nearer we approached it, just as an event in time does not exist until we reach the point of its beginning, but may appear in anticipation, in time perspective, when we approach it, the more distinctly, the closer we approach it, until we reach the threshold of the time span covered by the event, and the event begins to exist, the life is born. So to us, if we could move only from north to south, the house would begin to exist only when we reached its north door. That point would be the "birth" of the house. Passing through the span of space covered by the house—this would for us be its existence, its "life," and when we stepped out of the south door the house would cease to exist for us, we could never enter it and turn back to it again—that is, it would be dead and extinct, just as the life when we pass beyond its end point in time. Thus birth and death, appearance and extinction of an event in time, as our life, are the same as the beginning and end point of a thing in space, like a house. But the house appears to us to exist permanently, whether we are in it, within the length between beginning and end point, or not; while the event in time, our life, appears to us to exist only during the length of time when we are between its beginning and its end point in time, and before and after it does not exist for us, because we cannot go back to it or ahead into it. But assume time were reversible, like space—that is, we could go through it in any direction. There would then be no such thing as birth or origin, and death or extinction, but our life would exist permanently, as a part or span of time, just as the house exists as a part or section of space, and the question of immortality, of extinction or nonextinction by death, would then be meaningless. We should not exist outside of the span of time covered by our life, just as we do not exist outside of the part of space covered by our body in space, and to reach an event, as our life, we should have to go to the part of space and to the part of time where it occurs; but there would be no more extinction of the life by going beyond its length in time as there is extinction of a house by going outside of its door, and everything, like a human being, would have four extensions or dimensions—three extensions in space and one in time.[^[9]]

If space and time, and therefore the characteristics of space and time, are not real things or entities, but conceptions of the human mind, then those transcendental questions, as that of immortality after death and existence before birth, are not problems of fact in nature or outside of nature, but are meaningless, just as the question whether a house exists for an observer outside of the space covered by it. In other words, the questions of birth and death, of extinction or immortality, are merely the incidental results of the peculiarity of our conceptions of time, the peculiarity that the time of our conceptions is irreversible, flows continuously at a uniform rate in the same direction from the past to the future.

But if time has no reality, is not an existing entity, then these transcendental problems resulting from our time conception, of extinction or immortality, have no real existence, but are really phenomena of the human mind, and cease to exist if we go beyond the limitations of our mind, beyond our peculiar time conception.

It is interesting to realize that the modern development of science, in the relativity theory, has proved not only that time is not real, but a conception, but also has proved that the time of our conception does not flow uniformly at constant rate from past to future, but that the rate of the flow of time varies with the conditions; the rate of time flow of an event slows down with the motion relative to the event.

But the conception of a reversal of the flow of time is no more illogical than the conception of a change of the rate of the flow of time. It is inconceivable, because it is beyond the limitations of our mind.