Note 190 — Introductory material

We might be inclined, at first sight, to answer this question affirmatively. But several difficulties, I think, would prevent such an answer. In the first place, knowledge must start from perception. Hence, either we could have no knowledge except of our present perception, or else we must be able to contrast and compare it with some other perception. Now in the first case, since the present perception, by hypothesis, is a mere particular, knowledge of it is impossible, according to our premiss. But in the second case, the other perception, with which we compare our first, must have occurred at some other time, and with time, we have at once a form of externality. But what is more, our present perception is no longer a mere particular. For the power of comparing it with another perception involves a point of identity between the two, and thus renders both complex. Moreover, time must be continuous, and the present, as Bradley points out, is no mere point of time[188]. Thus our present perception contains the complexity involved in duration throughout the specious present: its mere particularity and its simplicity are lost. Its self-subsistence is also lost, for beyond the specious present, lie the past and the future, to which our present perception thus unavoidably refers us. Time at least, therefore, is essential to that identity in difference, which all knowledge postulates.