n men sought to explain
the human mind without regard to history or language or the social
nature of man.

In every act of sense there is a latent perception of space, of which
we only become conscious when objects are withdrawn from it. There are
various ways in which we may trace the connexion between them. We may
think of space as unresisting matter, and of matter as divided into
objects; or of objects again as formed by abstraction into a collective
notion of matter, and of matter as rarefied into space. And motion may
be conceived as the union of there and not there in space, and force
as the materializing or solidification of motion. Space again is the
individual and universal in one; or, in other words, a perception and
also a conception. So easily do what are sometimes called our simple
ideas pass into one another, and differences of kind resolve themselves
into differences of degree.

Within or behind space there is another abstraction in many respects
similar to it--time, the form of the inward, as space is the form of the
outward. As we cannot think of outward objects of sense or of outward
sensations without space, so neither can we think of a succession of
sensations without time. It is the vacancy of thoughts or sensations,
as space is the void of outward objects, and we can no more imagine
the mind without the one than the world without the other. It is to
arithmetic what space is to geometry; or, more strictly, arithmetic may
be said to be equally applicable to both. It is defined in our minds,
partly by the analogy of space and partly by the recollection of events
which have happened to us, or the consciousness of feelings which we are
experiencing. Like space, it is without limit, for whatever beginning or
end of time we fix, there is a beginning and end before them, and so
on without end. We speak of a past, present, and future, and again the
analogy of space assists us in conceiving of them as coexistent. When
the limit of time is removed there arises in our minds the idea of
eternity, which at first, like time itself, is only negative, but
gradually, when connected with the world and the divine nature, like
the other negative infinity of space, becomes positive. Whether time is
prior to the mind and to experience, or coeval with them, is (like
the parallel question about space) unmeaning. Like space it has been
realized gradually: in the Homeric poems, or even in the Hesiodic
cosmogony, there is n