History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, Incorporating the History of Hindu Chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray c39.s2.12

c39.s2.12

Infinite Time is a non-entity objectively considered, being only a construction of the Understanding based on the relation of antecedence and sequence in which the members of the phenomenal series are intuited to stand to one another. These phenomenal changes, as intuited by us in the empirical consciousness, fall into a series, which the Understanding conceives as order in Time. The Time-series, then, is a *schema* of the Understanding for representing the course of Evolution. The *schema* of the Understanding supervenes on the phenomenal world as order in time, and hence in the empirical consciousness the Time-series appears to have an objective reality, and to form a continuum. As there is an ultimate and irreducible unit of extensive quantity in the *gunas* or infinitesimal Reals of *Prakriti*, which are without constituent parts, so the moment may be conceived as the ultimate and irreducible unit of this time-continuum as represented in the empirical consciousness. A moment, therefore, cannot be thought of as containing any parts standing in the relation of antecedence and sequence. If change is represented by the Time-series, a moment as the unit of time may be supposed to represent the unit of change. Now all physical changes may be reduced to the motion of atoms in space ; we may therefore define the moment as representing the ultimate unit of such change—viz, the (instantaneous) transit of an atom (or rather a *tanmatra*) from one point in Space to the next succeeding point. Even an atom has constituent parts (the *tanmatras*), and hence an atom must take more than one moment to change its position. The motion of that which is absolutely simple and without parts from one point in Space to the next must be instantaneous, and conceived as the absolute unit of change (and, therefore, of time). If this is held to be an irreducible absolute unit, it will follow that what we represent as the time continuum is really discrete. Time is of one dimension. Two moments cannot co-exist. Neither does any series of moments exist in reality. Order in Time is nothing but the relation of antecedence and sequence, between the moment that is, and the moment that went just before. But only one moment, the present, exists. The future and the past have no meaning, apart from potential and sublatent phenomena. One kind of transformation, to which a thing is subject, is that it changes from the potential to the actual, and from the actual to the sublatent. This may be called the change of mark, as opposed to change of quality and the change due to duration or lapse of time. The present is the mark of actuality,—the future, the mark of potentiality,—and the past of sublatency,—in a phenomenon. Only one single moment is actual, and the whole Universe evolves in that one single moment. The rest is but potential or sublatent.