as
imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
individuates them; and dates are not independent of the events which
distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.

This, if I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is
not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two
principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the
second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent
inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me
whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at rest, if
I am not jolted or breathless, and if my felt environment does not change.
Inertia, or weight, in so far as it denotes something intrinsic, seems to
be but another name for substance or the principle of existence: in so far
as it denotes the first law of motion, it seems to be relative to an
environment. It would therefore be preferable to combine inertia and
attraction in a single formula, expressing the behaviour of bodies towards
one another in all their conjunctions, without in