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A future historian of ideas will certainly consider James and Bergson as two founders and initiators of a new and fresh movement in human thought to which Arthur Lovejoy has given a very appropriate name—temporalism. With such few exceptions as Heraclitus, Schelling in his last period, and, to a certain extent, Hegel, there has been a persistent tendency in the philosophy of all ages to interpret reality in static terms and to consider temporal existence as a shadowy replica of a timeless and Platonic universe. Even apparently dynamic conceptions of the world did not avoid eventual fascination by the changeless and static. Nothing sounds more dynamic than Schopenhauer's term "Will"; and yet in setting "Will" beyond time he arrived at something hardly less static and immutable than the Eleatics and Spinoza. Even Hegel's notion of "Werden" (Becoming) is not dynamic in the true sense of the word, since it is conceived to be a result of the synthesis of two opposites which are equally static—Being and Non-being. Only in the transition period between the nineteenth and twentieth century did the deep meaning of the temporal character of reality begin to be understood. Although it is difficult to assign a definite date to the birth of an idea, the rediscovery of time in modern thought will be connected with a decade between 1880–1890. In 1884 James published an article in Mind under the title, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology," where the main features of his concept of the stream of thought appeared; while on the other side of the Atlantic Henry Bergson silently meditated on his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, whose title is strikingly similar to that of James. Thus an extremely fertile period in philosophy began which found its natural continuation in the far-reaching revolution hi physics and the corresponding profound modification of basic notions including that of time. The recent generation of temporalists, marked by such names as Ch. D. Broad, Samuel Alexander, A. N. Whitehead, betrays the double influence of modern physics and Jamesian and Bergsonian thought.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2123-8_1

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