e
course of time, unless regularly marked by divisions of number, partakes
of the indefiniteness of the Heraclitean flux. By such reflections we
may conceive the Greek to have attained the metaphysical conception of
eternity, which to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the Divine
Being. No one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and
involved the subjectivity of all knowledge. 'Non in tempore sed cum
tempore finxit Deus mundum,' says St. Augustine, repeating a thought
derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of the results to
which his doctrine would have led.

The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion, like
the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to the mind of
the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view above or beyond them.
They had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and
were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The
consciousness of them had led the great Eleatic philosopher to
describe the nature of God or Being under negatives. He sings of 'Being
unbegotten and imperishable, unmoved and never-ending, which never was
nor will be, but always is, one and continuous, which cannot spring from
any other; for it cannot be said or imagined not to be.' The idea
of eternity was for a great part a negation. There are regions of
speculation in which the negative is hardly separable from the positive,
and even seems to pass into it. Not only Buddhism, but Greek as well as
Christian philosophy, show that it is quite possible that the human mind
should retain an enthusiasm for mere negations. In different ages and
countries there have been forms of light in which nothing could be
discerned and which have nevertheless exercised a life-giving and
illumining power. For the higher intelligence of man seems to require,
not only something above sense, but above knowledge, which can only
be described as Mind or Being or Truth or God or the unchangeable and
eternal element, in the expression of which all predicates fail and fall
short. Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time
but the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most
certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through a glass
darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides contrasts with the
vacuity of the thought which he is revolving in his mind.

Space is said by Plato to be the 'containing vessel or nurse of
genera