leaves of the forest, come and go, but the mathematical laws by which the
world is governed remain, and seem as if they could never change. The
ever-present image of space is transferred to time--succession is conceived
as extension. (We remark that Plato does away with the above and below in
space, as he has done away with the absolute existence of past and future.)
The course of time, unless regularly marked by divisions of number,
partakes of the indefiniteness of the Heraclitean flux. By such
reflections we may conceive the Greek to have attained the metaphysical
conception of eternity, which to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the
Divine Being. No one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and
involved the subjectivity of all knowledge. 'Non in tempore sed cum
tempore finxit Deus mundum,' says St. Augustine, repeating a thought
derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of the results to
which his doctrine would have led.

The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion, like the
infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to the mind of the
Greek, who was driven to find a point of view above or beyond them. They
had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and were very
familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The consciousness of
them had led the great Eleatic philosopher to describe the nature of God or
Being under negatives. He sings of 'Being unbegotten and imperishable,
unmoved and never-ending, which never was nor will be, but always is, one
and continuous, which cannot spring from any other; for it cannot be said
or imagined not to be.' The idea of eternity was for a great part a
negation. There are regions of speculation in which the negative is hardly
separable from the positive, and even seems to pass into it. Not only
Buddhism, but Greek as well as Christian philosophy, show that it is quite
possible that the human mind should retain an enthusiasm for mere
negations. In different ages and countries there have been forms of light