Chapter X (part 3)

It appears to us as if it is really growing up, i.e., as though it did not exist before. There disappeared the river, which was visible for so long a time; there appeared the bell-tower, which was invisible before. Such, exactly, is our relation to time, which is a continual coming—arising, as it were, from nothing and going into naught. Every thing lies for us in time, and only the section of the thing lies in space. Transferring our consciousness from the section of the thing to those parts of it which lie in time, we receive the illusion of motion on the part of the thing itself . It is possible to formulate the matter thus: the sensation of motion is the consciousness of the transition from space to time, i.e., from a clear space-sense to one that is unclear. With this in mind it is not difficult to realize that we are receiving as sensations, and projecting into the outside world as phenomena, the immobile angles and curves of the fourth dimension . On this account is it not necessary and possible to recognize that the world is immobile and constant, and that it seems to us to be moving and evolving simply because we are looking at it through the narrow slit of our sensuous receptivity? We are returning again to the question: what is the world and what p. 116 is consciousness? But now the question concerning the relation of our consciousness to the world is beginning to be formulated for us. If the world is a Great Something , possessing the consciousness of itself, so we are rays of that consciousness which are conscious of themselves, but unconscious of the whole. ______ If there be no motion, if it be an illusion, then we must search further—whence could this illusion have arisen? The phenomena of life—biological phenomena—much resemble the transition through our space of certain four-dimensional circles , the circles being extremely complicated, every one consisting of a great number of interlaced lines. The life of a man or of any other living being suggests a complicated circle. It begins always at one point (birth) and ends always at one point (death). We have complete justification for supposing that it is one and the same point . The circles are large and small, but they begin and end similarly, and they end at the same point where they began, i.e., at the point of non-existence, from the physico-biological standpoint, or of some existence other than the psychological one. What is the biological phenomenon, the phenomenon of life? Our science does not answer this question. This is the enigma. In the living organism, in the living cell, in the living protoplasm there is something indefinable, differentiating, living matter from dead matter. We recognize this something only by its functions. The chief of these functions is the power of self-reproduction —absent in the dead organism, the dead cell, dead matter. The living organism multiplies infinitely, incorporating and assimilating dead matter into itself. This ability to reproduce itself and to absorb dead matters with its mechanical laws is the inexplicable function of "life," showing that life is not simply a complex of mechanical forces, as the positivist philosophy attempts to prove. This thesis, that life is not a complex of mechanical forces, is corroborated also by the incommensurability of the phenomena of mechanical motion with the phenomena of life. Life phenomena cannot be expressed in terms of mechanical energy, calories of p. 117 heat or units of horse power; nor can the phenomena of life be artificially created by the physico-chemical method. If we shall regard every separate life as a circle of the fourth dimension, this will make clear to us why every circle is inevitably escaping from our space.