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Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by
transferring it to space. It is true that it there loses the
greater part of its obscurity; but this apparently is because, in
changing its environment, it has completely changed its nature
and no longer bears any relation to what it was when it was
placed in time. We are told, for instance, that innumerable
cities distributed over the surface of the earth are to us as if
they were not, so long as we have not seen them, and only begin
to exist on the day when we visit them. That is true; but space,
outside all metaphysical speculations, has realities for us which
time does not possess. Space, although very mysterious and
incomprehensible once we pass certain limits, is nevertheless
not, like time, incomprehensible and illusory in all its parts.
We are certainly quite able to conceive that those towns which we
have never seen and doubtless never will see indubitably exist,
whereas we find it much more difficult to imagine that the
catastrophe which, fifty years hence, will annihilate one of them
already exists as really as the town itself. We are capable of
picturing a spot whence, with keener eyes than these which we
boast to-day, we should see in one glance all the cities of the
earth and even those of other worlds, but it is much less easy
for us to imagine a point in the ages whence we should
simultaneously discover the past, the present and the future
because the past, the present and the future are three orders of
duration which cannot find room at the same time in our
intelligence and which inevitably devour one other.
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