Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: In other words, time is infinite. The following are the most important and fundamental characteristics of these two ideas. 1. The idea of succession is contingent. That of time is necessary. 2. The idea of succession is conditioned, or relative. That of time is unconditioned and absolute. 3. The idea of succession always implies that of limitation. Or succession is finite. The idea of time, on the other hand, implies that of the absence of all limitation. In other words, duration is infinite. IDEAS OF THE FINITE AND OF THE INFINITE. Body and space, succession and duration, are given to us, as we have seen, with the following characteristics : Body and succession are limitable ; time and space are illimitable. In other words, the former are finite, the latter infinite. " Now the ideas of the finite and the infinite," as remarked by Cousin, " may be detached from the ideas of body and succession, time and space, provided we keep in mind the subjects from which they are abstracted." These ideas then are in the mind. They are also distinct, the one from the other. Consequently the one cannot be derived from the other. The multiplication of the finite cannot give the infinite. Nor by dividing the infinite do we find the finite. Being correlative terms, the one necessarily supposes and suggests the other. The one cannot possibly exist in the mind without the other. Yet as above remarked, the one is perfectly distinct from the other. Nor is one of these ideas less distinct than the other. When I speak of the infinite, every one as readily and distinctly apprehends my meaning, as when I speak of the finite. The following propositions, for example—body is limitable ; space is illimitable—are equally intelligible to all minds, the one as the other. There are other f...