The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times by René Guénon

Author:René Guénon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Perennis
Published: 2001-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

23

Time Changed into Space

In an earlier chapter it was stated that in a certain sense time consumes space, and that it does so in consequence of the power of contraction contained in it, which tends continuously to reduce the spatial expansion to which it is opposed: but time, in its active opposition to the antagonistic principle, unfolds itself with ever-growing speed, for it is far from being homogenous, as people who consider it solely from a quantitative point of view imagine, but on the contrary it is ‘qualified’ at every moment in a different way by the cyclical conditions of the manifestation to which it belongs. The acceleration of time is becoming more apparent than ever in our day, because it becomes exaggerated in the final periods of a cycle, but it nevertheless actually goes on constantly from the beginning of the cycle to the end: it can therefore be said not only that time compresses space, but also that time is itself subject to a progressive contraction, appearing in the proportionate shortening of the four Yugas, with all that this implies, not excepting the corresponding diminution in the length of human life. It is sometimes said, doubtless without any understanding of the real reason, that today men live faster than in the past, and this is literally true; the haste with which the moderns characteristically approach everything they do being ultimately only a consequence of the confused impressions they experience.

If carried to its extreme limit the contraction of time would in the end reduce it to a single instant, and then duration would really have ceased to exist, for it is evident that there can no longer be any succession within the instant. Thus it is that ‘time the devourer ends by devouring itself’, in such a way that, at the ‘end of the world’, that is to say at the extreme limit of cyclical manifestation, ‘there will be no more time’; this is also why it is said that ‘death is the last being to die’, for wherever there is no succession of any kind death is no longer possible.[101] As soon as succession has come to an end, or, in symbolical terms, ‘the wheel has ceased to turn’, all that exists cannot but be in perfect simultaneity; succession is thus as it were transformed into simultaneity, and this can also be expressed by saying that ‘time has been changed into space’.[102] Thus a ‘reversal’ takes place at the last, to the disadvantage of time and to the advantage of space: at the very moment when time seemed on the point of finally devouring space, space in its turn absorbs time; and this, in terms of the cosmological meaning of the Biblical symbolism, can be said to be the final revenge of Abel on Cain.

There is a sort of ‘prefiguration’ of the absorption of time by space, of which its authors are no doubt quite unconscious, in the recent physico-mathematical theories that treat the ‘space-time’ complex as a

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