3.
We can say of Nature as object that it is, not of Nature as subject; for this is being or productivity.
This absolute productivity must pass over into an empirical nature. In the idea of absolute productivity, is the thought of an ideal infinity. The ideal infinity must become an empirical one.
But empirical infinity is an infinite becoming. Every infinite series is but the exhibition of an intellectual or ideal infinity. The original infinite series (the ideal of all infinite series) is that wherein our intellectual infinity evolves itself, viz., Time. The activity which sustains this series is the same as that which sustains our consciousness; consciousness, however, is continuous. Time, therefore, as the evolution of that activity, cannot be produced by composition. Now, as all other infinite series are only imitations of the originally infinite series, Time, no infinite series can be otherwise than continuous. In the original evolution the retarding agent (without which the evolution would take place with infinite rapidity) is nothing but original reflection; the necessity of reflection upon our acting in every organic phase (continued duplicity in identity) is the secret stroke of art whereby our being receives permanence.
Absolute continuity, therefore, exists only for the intuition, but not for the reflection. Intuition and reflection are opposed to each other. The infinite series is continuous for the productive intuition—interrupted and composite for the reflection. It is on this contradiction between intuition and reflection that those sophisms are based, in which the possibility of all motion is contested, and which are solved at every successive step by the productive activity. To the intuition, for example, the action of gravity takes place with perfect continuity; to the reflection, by fits and starts. Hence all the laws of mechanics, whereby that which is properly only the object of the productive intuition becomes an object of reflection, are really only laws for the reflection. Hence those fictitious notions of mechanics, the atoms of time in which gravitation acts, the law that the moment of solicitation is infinitely small, because otherwise an infinite rapidity would be produced in finite time, &c., &c. Hence, finally, the assertion that in mathematics no infinite series can really be represented as continuous, but only as advancing by fits and starts.
The whole of this inquiry into the opposition between reflection and the productivity of the intuition, serves only to enable us to deduce the general statement that in all productivity, and in productivity alone, there is absolute continuity—a statement of importance in the consideration of the whole of Nature; inasmuch, for example, as the law that in Nature there is no leap, that there is a continuity of forms in it, &c., is confined to the original productivity of Nature, in which certainly there must be continuity, whereas from the stand-point of reflection all things must appear disconnected and without continuity—placed beside each other, as it were; we must therefore admit that both parties are right; those, namely, who assert continuity in Nature—for example, in organic Nature—no less than those who deny it, when we take into consideration the difference of their respective stand-points; and we thereby, at the same time, arrive at the distinction between dynamical and atomistic physics; for, as will soon become apparent, the two are distinguished only by the fact that the former occupies the stand-point of intuition, the latter that of reflection.
4.
These general principles being presupposed, we shall be able, with more certainty, to reach our aim, and make an exposition of the internal organism of our system.
(a) In the idea of becoming, we think the idea of gradualness. But an absolute productivity will exhibit itself empirically as a becoming with infinite rapidity, whereby there results nothing real for the intuition.
(Inasmuch as Nature must in reality be thought as engaged in infinite evolution, the permanence, the resting of the products of Nature—the organic ones, for instance—is not to be viewed as an absolute resting, but only as an evolution proceeding with infinitely small rapidity or with infinite tardiness. But hitherto evolution, with even finite rapidity, not to speak of infinitely small rapidity, has not been constructed.)