Book 4 — SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER I.

On the Discontinuity of the Teleological Series of Ethics and History.

We have previously seen that every continuous series is indefinitely divisible, and that consequently no two terms of such a series are immediately coadjacent. On the other hand, any series which consists of terms which are immediately coadjacent, and between which intermediate terms of the same series cannot be inserted, is not indefinitely divisible, and a fortiori not continuous. Applying this to the case of a series of psychical processes, we can see that where the sequence is of a mechanical routine type it is continuous, since it can be indefinitely divided into smaller fragments, each exhibiting the same law of sequence as the whole. (Strictly, it ought to be added that the other condition of continuity is also fulfilled, since whatever point of time thus divides the sequence falls within the series itself.) But where you have new teleological adaptation there is a manifest solution of this continuity. The new purpose emerges at a definite point in the sequence: what has gone before up to this point belongs to the working out of a different interest or purpose, what comes after to the working out of the now freshly emerged interest. Each may form a continuous process within itself, but the transition from the one to the other is not continuous. There is where the old purposive series ends and the new one begins, a genuine case of immediate coadjacency of terms between which intermediate members cannot be interposed.

In another connection, it would, I think, be easy to show how this consideration is of itself fatal to the reality of Time. My point here is simply to maintain that the facts just referred to do not warrant the inference that “ultimate Reality” or “the Absolute” is for itself a discontinuous series. My objection to this view is that the “emergence of new selective interest” is itself essentially a feature of the finite experience which, because finite, appears in a temporal form. The distinction between the “new” and the “habitual” has no meaning for a completed and infinite experience, which embraces all existence in a perfectly harmonious form. Or, to put it in another way, the serial form of arrangement itself has no significance except for an experience which has to advance progressively from one stage to another of 312partial insight and comprehension. This seems as true of “logical” order or ethical order of valuation according to moral worth as of merely numerical order. In fact, we said in Book II. chap. 4, § 10, that the serial arrangement is the simplest and most general expression of that relational mode of apprehension which we decided to be at once inevitable for finite knowledge and inadequate to express Reality. It is on this ground that I feel obliged, as I understand the problem at present, to hold that ultimate Reality is neither a continuous nor a discontinuous series, for the reason that it is not for itself a series at all.

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