Mathematical philosophy, a study of fate and freedom; lectures for educated laymen, by Cassius J. Keyser.

TRANSFORMATION 175
It is evident that the nut to be cracked, or one of the
nuts, is Time. We have seen that in the world of logic
things and their relations are timeless, they are-all are
present at once; but the things of the other world and their
transformations are temporal, they are not all present
at once, but occur in temporal order-each thing becomes
its own successor and, in so becoming, ceases to be, so
that there is a Past (which is empty) and a Future (never
filled)-only a mobile Now, sole field and vehicle of change
and transformation. How can either of these sharply
contrasted worlds represent the other-the things that
are, standing for the things that happen, the permanent
for the changeful, rest for motion, relations for transformations, the beginningless and everlasting for the
momentary children of birth and decay-the timeless for
the temporal? It is evident, as said before, that one of
the troublesome factors is Time. In endeavoring to
manage this factor, science has tried two and only two
ways-the way of importation and the way of suppression.
We are going to see what they are.
The former is the way of Newton, the way of his
Fluxions and Fluents. From the objective dynamic
world of sense and physics time is imported into the subjective static world of conception and logic-it is smuggled
in with motion: points are not immobile, they move;
lines and curves do not really exist,-they are not unbegotten inhabitants of eternity,-they are engendered in
time by motion of points; the same is held respecting
surfaces, which are but the paths of moving lines and
curves; and respecting solids, produced by moving suffaces; x, y and z are viewed as varying actually, they
grow, their increments are fiuents; and the static world is
invaded by velocities and accelerations. The Newtonian