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Updated: June 28, 2025
The difference between the two is like the difference between prior and subsequent, or between that which forms and that which is formed. That it may be still better comprehended what discrete degrees are, what their nature is, and how they differ from continuous degrees, the angelic heavens may serve as an example.
Now according to Bergson the red which we know directly is a period of the vibrations of matter contracted by memory so as to produce an actual perceived fact. As matter red does not change, it is absolutely discrete and complex, in a word, logical: as fact it is non-logical and forms a creative process of duration.
Grand instruments may possess the former quality in perfection by reason of their size, but the latter very imperfectly, either through want of original configuration, or distortion arising from flexure through their own weight. But, unless an instrument be perfect in this respect, as well as adequate in the other, it may fail to decompose a nebula into discrete points.
All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces, that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in nature.
For example: two fives make ten, but the two fives have no common boundary, but are separate; the parts three and seven also do not join at any boundary. Nor, to generalize, would it ever be possible in the case of number that there should be a common boundary among the parts; they are always separate. Number, therefore, is a discrete quantity. The same is true of speech.
The processes by which Parmenides obtains his remarkable results may be summed up as follows: Compound or correlative ideas which involve each other, such as, being and not-being, one and many, are conceived sometimes in a state of composition, and sometimes of division: The division or distinction is sometimes heightened into total opposition, e.g. between one and same, one and other: or The idea, which has been already divided, is regarded, like a number, as capable of further infinite subdivision: The argument often proceeds 'a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter' and conversely: The analogy of opposites is misused by him; he argues indiscriminately sometimes from what is like, sometimes from what is unlike in them: The idea of being or not-being is identified with existence or non-existence in place or time: The same ideas are regarded sometimes as in process of transition, sometimes as alternatives or opposites: There are no degrees or kinds of sameness, likeness, difference, nor any adequate conception of motion or change: One, being, time, like space in Zeno's puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, are regarded sometimes as continuous and sometimes as discrete: In some parts of the argument the abstraction is so rarefied as to become not only fallacious, but almost unintelligible, e.g. in the contradiction which is elicited out of the relative terms older and younger: The relation between two terms is regarded under contradictory aspects, as for example when the existence of the one and the non-existence of the one are equally assumed to involve the existence of the many: Words are used through long chains of argument, sometimes loosely, sometimes with the precision of numbers or of geometrical figures.
In a still larger nebula, where the local aggregations are both greater and more remote from the common centre of gravity, they may have condensed into masses of molten matter before the general distribution of them has greatly altered. In short, as the conditions in each case determine, the discrete masses produced may vary indefinitely in number, in size, in density, in motion, in distribution.
If we analyse our conceptions of Time and Space we seem forced to postulate that they are both infinitely divisible and infinitely extensible; they are both what is called continuous and not discrete, we cannot conceive any minimum in their division; both duration in Time and extension in Space can be reduced, as it were, to a mathematical point; nor can we conceive any maximum in either duration or extension.
Procedure, that is proper in the sphere of logic, is out of place in psychology and theology. Concepts such as person and nature must be kept fluid, if they are not to mislead. If they are made into hard and fast ideas, into sharply defined abstractions, they will be taken to represent discrete psychic entities, external to one another as numbers are.
For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture.
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