Chapter I: The Pre-conscious World: A Space-and-Time Picture

Extract

But deepest of all illusory Appearances are your two grand world-enveloping Appearances, Space and Time.—CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus, 1830.

The Prime, that willed ere wareness was,
Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws.

THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts.

Question one. What were the nature and characteristics of the world in its three main divisions of matter, plant life, and animal life, before it emerged to its fourth main division in the explicitly conscious life of man? The answer to this question carries us backward in time to a period so remote from the present that no answer would be at all possible were it not that in his emergence to consciousness man rose above the time-stream of sense, and by the help of language has been able to recover and reconstruct the otherwise irrecoverable past. While the actual sense-facts which constituted the natural environment contemporary with man’s emergence have long since vanished in the stream of change, we know now, from our knowledge of the past and present, that in any piece of virgin timber or park land of to-day we should have, substantially and typically, the same natural environment from which man emerged thousands of years ago. We should have, first of all, the same inorganic world of fixed geographic relations and definite structures: sun, moon, stars, clouds, winds, waters, soil, rocks, etc.; second, the differentiated forms of organic insentient life: grass, flowers, shrubs, trees, etc.; third, the various forms of sentient life: fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals; all these multitudinous forms, inorganic and organic, differentiated from each other and united with each other in a complete network of space, time, and causal relations.