Among those which life sets us, there
is none to which our brain seems more definitely and strictly
closed; and they remain, if not as unimaginable, at least as
incomprehensible as on the day when they were first perceived.
What corresponds, outside us, with what we call time and space?
We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the
"apriorists," who hold that the idea of time is innate in us,
does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is
an a priori form of our sensibility, that is to say, an intuition
preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the "empiricists," who
consider that this idea is acquired only by experience, does not
enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the
abstract formula of the changes in the universe. Whether space,
as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an
order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in
representing time or whether time be an essential form of any
representation, whether time be the father of space or space the
father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts
of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure
empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same
darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the
formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention
indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday
and to-day--Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully,
Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee,
Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless others--have
been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may
contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike
struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of
our world.
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