ons of centuries; these being after all but compounds
of our alphabet of enduring or repeated sensations and thoughts. We can
suppose this arithmetical process to operate upon past duration or upon
future duration, and there is no limit to the numbers that we can write
down. But there is one thing that we cannot do; we cannot fix upon a
point when Time or succession began, or upon a point when it will cease.
That is an operation not in keeping with our faculties; the very
supposition is impracticable. We cannot entertain the notion of a state
of things wherein the fact of continuance had no place; the effort
belies itself. Time is inseparable from our mental nature; whatever we
imagine, we must imagine as enduring. Some philosophers have supposed
that we must be endowed by nature with the conception of Time, before we
begin to exercise our senses; but the difficulty would be to deprive us
of that adjunct without extinguishing our mental nature. Give us
sensibility, and you cannot withhold the element of Time. The
supposition of Kant and others, that it is implanted in us as an empty
form, before we begin to employ our senses upon things, is needless; for
as soon as we move, see, hear, think, are pleased or pained, we create
time. And our notion of Time in general is exactly what these
sensibilities make it, only enlarged by our constructive power already
spoken of.

[MATTER AND VOID SUPPLEMENTARY.]

While all our senses and feelings give us time, it is our experience of
Motion and Resistance,--the energetic or active side of our nature
alone,--that gives us Space. The simplest feature of Space is the
alternation of Resistance and Non-Resistance, of obstructed motion and
freedom to move. The hand presses dead upon an obstacle; the obstacle
gives way and allows free motion; these two contrasting experiences are
the elements of the two contrasting facts--Matter and Space. By none of
the five senses, in their pure and proper character as senses, can we
obtain these experiences; and hence at an earlier stage of inquiry into
the mind, when our knowledge-giving sensibilities were referred to the
five senses, there was no adequate account of the notion of Space or
Extension. Space includes more than this simple contrast of the
resisting and the non-resisting; it includes what we call the
Co-existing or Contemporaneous, the great aggregate of the outspread
world, as existing at any moment, a somewhat complicated attainment,
wh