Here may be method, then, and sanity, but there is always contradiction, obstinate contradiction, compounded contradiction! The soul, unity of the body, is only another thing or part in the body, and at the same time, though in the body, it is after all not really of the body. Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not consciously intended, and in the face of all, whatever our hopes or our beliefs, we must feel grave doubts and confess our doubting. Those who do build better than they know, if enlightened, would not again build in the same way. Two contradictions may be better than one, but even two make us wonder.
Closely connected with the contradictions in our [p.038] customary ideas of reality, and ideas of wholeness or unity, there is the way in which we calmly take opposite sides in our notions about space and time, and about that very fundamental factor of our experience--causation. These are, all of them, so general and fundamental as possibly to seem too abstruse even for mention in this place, since throughout these chapters we are courting simplicity, but of space, and time, and causation, only what is very simple needs to be said. Thus to the ordinary consciousness how fatally things are separated from each other by conditions of space and time. Then is not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us. What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that they are far apart? Do we not constantly forestall the future and retain the past? Indeed, when all is said, a thousand years are as one day, and all the places of the earth are one. So real, and so vast, and so physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time, [p.039] in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and living here--or there?--we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.