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This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order If, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: GREENWALT, MRS. MARY ELIZABETH HALLOCK- TITLE: TIME ETERNAL PLACE: [PHILADELPHIA?] DA TE : [190- COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record Restrictions on Use: s x08 Z3 ■ V.2 1 GreenoTfalt, Mra^ Mary Elizabeth Hallock-, 18?l-i J Tir.e eternal, by Mary Hallock-Groenewalt. .. loo* 1 ture doliverefl under the auapices of the Poblio llJ brariea of Philadelphia. [PhiladelphiaJ 190- T^ ooT(>r-titlep.9 p. 2Z^onm Half-title, FILM SIZE: 3^. M TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: 1[^. IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA QliO IB ,IIB DATE FILMED: .^A^ak^. INITIALS fixBlS- FILMED BY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE. CT ^^ r Association for Information and Image Kffanagement 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 12 3 4 5 lljllllilllllllllllllllllllllljlllljlllliiulil UN mwm 6 7 8 9 10 11 miIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiimIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIi mm ^ 12 13 14 ,1 15 mm llllllllillllllllllllMllllllllllllll Inches 1 I 2 I I I I I 1.0 !« |3.2 1 US u ■tuu 1.4 2.5 22 i.l 2.0 1.8 1.6 1.25 T MfiNUFPCTURED TO nilM STRNDRRDS BY fiPPLIED IMAGE- INC. ^rf)^ Ql^ f TIME ETERNAL. By MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT, 1424 MASTER STREET, PHILADELPHIA, PENNA. Lecture delivered under the auspices of the Public Libraries of Philadelphia. »♦♦• 'tm II.. \w^ *TIME ETERNAL BY MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT There was once a man who said to himself, ''When I travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific on the railroad train I gain three hours; when I go all the way around the world I gain a day; now supposing I travel all the time! I'd never die, because, of course, I would never be quite as many days old as I would have been had I not kept moving." This man, so the newspaper said, went crazy thinking over the problem. I hope such a fate may be spared us. Perhaps all of us have at some time or other speculated on this subject of time. How strange this thing which never had a begm- ning and will never have an end ! How truly bewildering such eternity! This little peculiarity, that of wondering about this phe- nomenon, we have shared with the greatest thinkers of all ages. Before engaging in the particular problem of our subject let us rehearse briefly the opinions of some of these various men: Aristotle, in the 4th century before Christ, defined time as the " measure of motion with reference to the earlier and later." So far as this goes it must be approved. Time as we think it is msepar- able from motion because it is being acted away. If all thmgs were stationary and immovable there would be no earlier or later. Then came the Stoics, about 308 B.C., who defined time as the extension of the motion of the world, which they said was infinite both in the direction of the past and of the future. This we can j> notes and facts could be exhaustively set forth. 2 TIME ETERNAL hardly accept because the motion of the world has nothing to do with Had r; " " ^'°"" ""^ '""^ ^*°'y^'*'' -•'-'' °- subject Cn Had that man travelled all the time, had he gone arounJ the world instantaneously, around and around in a pneumatic tube, he wou d have been just as old as if he had remained sitting at his home hS self. We have used the turning of the world as a measure but the fToTtW %" n'"' '" '° ""' '""^ '''■ O- *•- - quite Sep rite from that of all morgan.c things about us, except in so far as theL inorganic thmgs keep up the mechanism of the body. Pl^fn^''-^ ir'^fJ ^"*"' '"*'' ^^^ '"^J^^* '" ^ different way when Plato, m the oth century B.C., and Thomas Aquinas in tLlT^ TIZ ^'%^'!";:*' ^'^•d that time began with the wo Id "This " the latter sa.d, "had not existed from eternity, but had been called mto existence out of nothing by God's almigh y power at a de er mmate mstant in time, with which instant time began. " Plato realized evidently that matter developed into form onlv stand ih n : "°"r "''^'^ ^°""^ ^^ ^^"^^^ ^- ^^^^ stand what I mean if you can imagine the world a mass of moving Jlecules, something as little particles of matter show up i„ r aj pattern, like electriJfounTainrTaleidorp:. ^^^ ^^^T the bel tV'' *'"^ ^^°"'' •^^ nothing'regular enough by whch the before and after could be reckoned. "X wnicn After Plato came a man who said that time must have had a thoXL" " ""'' ""'" ''^^^ ^^^^''^'' '"^^ P— t moment As at 'ris f^ rLgi^inru^ ^ — ^'^ ^^^^<^' -- that twh 'rf' ''S T'"'^ '''^^" '^" ^^^""^ ^''^t the soul, the spirit that which possibly has nothing to do with our bodies, could not be in t),?'",'^r' *^' *™''' °°*^ f°""d '" the philosophv of the Tews After the 15th century the truth was formulated that we never •'fcV * I «4 MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT 3 can think of anything except it be connected with either time or space, and in the 17th century Leibnitz said simply that ''space is the order of co-existing phenomena, while time is the order of suc- cession of phenomena." And then came Kant. I have in the world of letters two great overweaning admira- tions. One of them is Darwin, the other is Kant. To say that I would have been willing to wash their feet and dry them with my hair is too trilling. To say that I would have been willing to sacri- fice my life rather than that they should not have lived is, so far as I can tell, without being brought face to face with the proposition, nearer the feeling. It is not quite so much what Kant did as the way he did it which makes the mouth gape and the eyes open wide. His conclusions were reached through as subtle and abstruse rea- soning as may be possible to any human mind. And yet, we are going to try to explain from a strictly material, physical standpoint that which this extremely great man seized so gloriously, through things which we cannot see, which we cannot feel, which we can only think. Kant's icfea was that time is "our particular way of looking at things. " That our sort of time at least does not exist in a chair or table, or the air, or the earth. That we see all things in a medium of time because it is a peculiarity of the brain to do so. His difficulties regarding the subject are our difficulties. His questioning arose out of the impossibility of conceiving of time as either having bounds or as having none absolutely. After Kant came Herder, who said that what was needed was " a Physiology of the Human Faculties of Knowledge ;" then Herbert, who, born in 1776, held " that space and time are the results of the psychical mechanism; " and then Trendelenburg, whose idea was that time and space are products of the "motion" which takes place within and without us as well. Here our work begins. We accept the suggestions of these last three men, but we are going to dare to specify. We are not going to be content with saying that physiology in general is at the root of our sense of time, we are going to say what part of physiology it is. We are not going to be satisfied with saying that the motion withm has given us a sense of time, we are going to say what motion. I feel particularly emboldened to do this because it seems to me the testimony* already offered by music has a vital bearing on the subject. • N. B. See Popular Science Monthly for Sept. 1903, Pulse and Rhythm. * TIME ETERNAL A character in Mr. James Huneker's Melomaniacs (the word means music-maniacs) thought that through music he could find the fourth dimension. I am hopeful enough to think that music may prove the means through which we may have been led to know more the art^/'™'^^' '^"'^ ''^^ ""'" ^' °°^ ^™^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^"^''^^ °^ The first step is to define time. Most of the dictionary defini- lons are not such When, for example, the Standard Dictionary ZriJ^T- '" ^ 1 '" P'"°^ *'*■ '^"'■^''°"' ^^ ^^^ practically say- ing that Time IS Time. Let me coin a definition for you: Time is periodic motion recording change within the organism, and thought of by It as extending forward in one dimension only. No one will quarrel with the fact that time is inseparable from change That that change must record within us we have ien from the little story of the man who thought that by travelling around the world he could beat time. Let me repeat ^hat we are considering time only in the form in which it appears to us Dwel^rs in Mars may for all we know have a toSly difflent Idea of time from us, "a sort of time" which, in Prof. Royce's words, may include the truth of ours and still make clear how the world process somehow returns into itself. " A sort of time in other words which would make it unnecessary for us as well as' Kant to have to conceive time as being in a straight line and yet having no beginning and no end. Or a thing which no matter how much k"s subdivided will still have a piece left. n..vS''T^«°^ '"''"'■'^ ™P''^' '"°"°"- ^y should this motion be periodic? Because we would never have had the capacity of meas- uring time regularly if something did not accent the r^nc s?n mo" H^""""' ''^ "°^'' ^^^^'^-^ - ^ ^P-e empty "f sun, moon and stars or any recurrent motion to realize how im- possible it would have been for us under the circumstances To gauge day and night. Something must accent the recur eL must make the recurring landmark. It is through the jolt that the presence is made conscious. ■■ There remains the fact that time is one-dimensional, and of that the psychological laboratories approve. We think of things ^hav ing happened back of us or to happen before us. Now all that we have seen or felt or tasted or smelt in our past lives, gets shut up within us into a little box which we call the brat ^ ►• n MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT 5 or brain and nervous organism. This brain is like a composite picture made on a sensitive film. It gets one impression after another one moment after another, but the moment a new picture is added it becomes part of the old picture, one with it, needing no time for its seeing even if time was used in its making. We see our lives, any short instant we choose to look at them, just as they are said to ap- pear before a man about to drown. It may have taken years to make the picture, the clock may have ticked away myriads of seconds dur- ing the performance, but any time you can look back and see the thing at one glance. The time which it took to make the picture is not necessary for the re-seeing of it. I hear Mr. Paderewski play a whole Recital programme, and afterward the whole is before me as in one glance; to hear it I do not have to say he played this in the first bar and this in the second. It does not take me two hours every time I think that recital over. Evidently the real US within the brain does not know or need time. It is, and that is all we can say of it. Camille Flammarion, the great French astronomer, relates this anecdote in his book, "The Unknown." He says: Madame d'Es- perance, whose faculties as a medium were extraordinary, says of one of her impressions, ''How can I describe the indescribable? Time had disappeared. Space was no more. I felt that thoughts were the only really tangible things". Notice this very particularly, that whereas time was present during the manufacturing of the impressions of our brain, it is not inex- tricably part of the impressions, is not bound up in the impression. Please, for my sake, keep the motion of the world around the sun quite out of your head, remembering the man who would travel, and think what can record the happenings which make up the furni- ture of the brain by periodic motion which records inward change and which is not itself part and parcel of the brain's inward happenings. Once upon a day Galileo, then a student at Pisa, while sitting in a church took to watching the chandelier. It swung first through a greater arc and then through a smaller. He thought the same length of time was taken for all the excursions. He verified the fact by the only small regular one-dimensional time measure at his command. He verified the fact by feeling his pulse. That one dis- covery made all the clocks and watches possible. They are based ft t' • • 6 TIME ETERNAL ZtlerJhlTit "' ?' P'"^"'"" ^^'"«""^ '° 'J^- ^'"e time no matter what the arc through which it travels .. .^^ K? 'f ""^^^ ^^^ mechanical effect is of the recurrent suree of new hte blood on the brain. Dr. Holmes says, " The forcib eTmpac of the four columns of arterial blood raises the brain in normlTc^n t:ZZ^ ' ' '-'^ '' -'- ^' ''-"^' - acciden~X" Regular motion has, therefore, accompanied every single thought dit,on of time." Before the brain formed, periodic moSon swin^ mg m one direction was waiting for it. In L Lily forrthoul" e^^r^ce"'^ ""'''' ''" "°^ '-^ -^"'- -™ aTaTart "c^t It is this idea which in the twinkling of an eye changed an abstruse and unintelligible book into onf more oTless eSy o" comprehension to me. led to the solution as I was by the metro nome niarks of musical composition, the time rate of verba uttrance" NeedTe^:^saT;h V'r "' ""'"'^'"^ '""^ ^ ^ «^ "h" "-^ R^o:'ZZl\^' '' '''' '-' °^ ^-^'« Critique of Pure thi. J'\7^ "'^"°" ^^' ^^^'''^^ the brain as a whole ' It is this which differentiates the question. feel t^'Y" '^'''"' '""'"' '' '""' ^h^°"«h '^^ entire body you can feel the mfluences permeating into the tissue-! Tt,».. a . Time makes a part of the brain as a whole Periodin n,«f of J::!,"!!!,: "jr„7,H™ '° "" "r* -* " «'"p- tumgs. une of them may be about Port Arthur in t ' 1 '■ ■^m V- V if^ .■^^ MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT 7 Manchuria, another a murder in your own city, a third an Antarctic expedition. In that one instant these are all focused mto one single unit of your time, the unit of time in which you happened to see them While glancing at the paper you may have been tapping with your foot or fingers, you were aware of what sort of a day it was its atmosphere, etc. Your nose may have been smelling the bunch of violets at the lady's corsage next to you, you might pos- sibly have been smoking: every one of these impressions would have gone into the same instant. Clearly one-dimensional time is a matter of the whole brain, and never belongs to some part of it to the exclusion of the other part. Periodic motion has accompanied every change in the brain, but has not been intimate part of it The whole of the brain has been made through the circulation of the blood to move regularly. Internally the brain has been fed, not by this force, but by capillary attraction. Here we have the phenomena of regular motion being an accompaniment of every bought without its being part and parcel of that thought. Remem- ber that I am talking of the way we Mnk of time. The worlds with their suns may swing in a motion which is periodic, which has a before and an after, but which does not progress m one direction. That is not our time. A being in Mars may have three heads to the right and to the left and up above and so see happenings as being periodic, recording inward change but progressing in three directions; that would not be our time. We are talking now of our way of looking at time and nothing else. In talking this problem over with a psychologist, he said : " You would have to show then that a sense of time is with us when we sleep ■■ So far as that goes, there is plenty of evidence that such is the case. People have been known to be able to wake up at a certain time. They have been known to gauge the time accurately when they wake up during the night. On the other hand, when peo- ple faint the heart action gets so weak that I have been told it was sometimes almost impossible to feel any pulse at the wrist. During a fainting spell the sense of time is more or less lost. There are apparently remote and yet similar matters which add proof to our idea. When we have fever the pulse is much accel- erated and the day seems to pass by more slowly. The inward mo- ments are being ticked off quicker and therefore the day seems longer Under the excitement of expectancy the same results pre- 8 TIME ETERNAL vail. "A watched pot never boils. " Similarly children, whose pulse rates are faster, find the uninteresting hours at church move most tortoise-like. "But, granted all this," you will say, "how do you explain the fact that we think of time as progressing in an unending line for- ward into space?" I explain it on this ground, that addition always means extension to us. If I have an apple and add another to it the two take up more room, project further into space, than the one; any addition means this. I hold that through the custom of the brain to think of extension when there is addition in finding one sensation added to another, one motion (one-dimensional) added to another, it thinks extension whether there is extension or not. It is a fallacy of the brain. It is more than possible that we have conceived of time as conveying us toward heaven in a direction opposite to our feet because the brain's pulsing has been in that direction. The king- dom of heaven may be within us after all. Here we have compassed with a simple explanation our defi- nition of time. We have seen that there is a phenomenon of our physical selves which can explain why it is that we can conceive of nothing except as occurring under our way of thinking of time. It is because our every thought, the every thought of our parents and grand-parents and their grand-parents back to the insect family or before, have always had their birth under circumstances of periodic motion, recording inward change and thought of by us as progressing forward into space. But, you will say, what about the before and after, the earlier and later. We are living now and we die afterwards. Let us imagine ourselves dead ; after what has been said can we, with the heart stilled, the arteries in motionless ebb, think that what is left of us lives in the time which the bodily mechanism gave us ? Re- member what it is like when one faints. And our idea of time, the idea we had before we began this thinking-did we not think of it as leading us to a place far away from this? Why need our spirits go anywhere if they need no room? As to our bodies, do they not come right back again to what they were before, dust to dust ?— Caesar turned into nourishment for a flower ; »?» i I, MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT 9 "Alexander's disintegrated body helping to make the mortar for a wall." Alternation outside of us does not bring a sense of forwardness into space. Here is the point as it strikes me in the whole subject. It must be thoroughly understood what are the characteristic ways in which the before and after appear to us and what it is like in inor- ganic nature. Our bodies grow ; they disintegrate, turn into other bodies which in their turn disintegrate, form other bodies and so on in an endless chain. A tree grows. It is made into a chair, the chair is burned up, the gases get into the air, new trees are fed, new chairs made, etc. This is the theory of conservation of energy, thor- oughly worked out by some half-dozen men of the past century. All this would be simply change which brought things back to the same place again;— a kaleidoscope; various images of the same things. Supposing we imagine that primitive man learned time from his surroundings. There would be the sun rising and setting, rising and setting, and the change in the verdure. But we have seen, I think, that if the sun did not record change in his inward experience, there would be nothing but alternation, which would imply neither change nor progress in one direction. It would be the same as if a platter, the same platter, was turned once toward you and then away from you. As to the verdure, there is no change in the tropical regions. Man did not leave the tropics till very late in his development. But even were this not so, look at a landscape. How peaceful and eter- nal, immobile and unchanging everything looks. How quiet the in- ternal change in the verdure. How irregular the breeze. Could the sense of throbbing, pulsing time with its eternal upward and forward motion have come from this? I think not. It may be that in our finite condition through some such sort of reasoning, clarifying and eliminating of facts we must begin to see the infinite. "Yea, though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Mary Hallock-Greenewai.t. M i . ' m"- si>' »i \\ /^ <' Y A A «. I