Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

17

live in two contradictory worlds. The one is the world which is perceptible to our senses, the other is the world of our inner experience. The former can be thought of as being in space, the latter is only in time. But the time of our inner world is not the sort that can be measured — as it were spatially — in minutes and seconds. Our inner time-experience cannot be measured by any physical standard of measurement. It flows in a continuous stream, sometimes faster and more intensely, sometimes more slowly and leisurely. Our inner world is a continuum and is continuously in motion. The outer world is discrete, that is to say it consists of things which, though they do move and change, can be said to exist as distinct entities in a way that nothing in the flow of our inner experience does.

But even the outer world, if we look at it more closely, is in fact always in constant motion and change. When we try to get at the ‘thingness’ of things that quality in them which is permanent and by virtue of which they are what they are — we find that it exists only in idea. The reality dissolves into motion. And so we have, with Bergson, to admit the primacy of motion, because there is not even a thing which moves; there is only motion which is at the back of things. And, as Bergson implies, we could indeed live in this world of continuous motion by instinct, were it not that we have superseded instinct by intellect. It is our intellect which turns the world into things by taking sections in the flow of our sensations, isolating elements in it and giving them names. It does this to everything in the outer world and tries to do it even with our inner world, though, as we all know, it is not so easy to crystallise our desires and emotions into words. This process of turning a chaos of sensations into things and giving them names is the learning process that every child has to go through. For without concepts, which are the ‘things’ of thought and are represented by words, we cannot think.

Reality is always changing. We can never, as Heracleitus pointed out, step into the same stream twice. Furthermore different people faced with the same situation or event will take different cross-sections from the flux or chaos of experience, and will thus see the same phenomena from different angles and give different names to the same thing. And because our names and words must by definition mean the same every time they are used, even though the phenomena to which they refer change or differ from one another in detail, they can never fully represent reality. Hans Vaihinger in his Philosophy of As If showed that mathematics and the physical sciences, which to many people appear to be the most down-to-earth reality since all our technology depends on them, are almost wholly based on fictions. And because no cross-section that