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INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
Time (durdée) assumes fundamental importance in Bergson. Space and time are, according to him, diametrically opposite in nature. Space is static, while time (durée) is the principle of creative evolution: Realtime, according to him, is duration and not the juxtaposition of discrete instants. Real time (durée reelle) is 'heterogeneous' and continuous'. The real temporal process is a multiplicity of 'interpenetration'. Real time flows in an indivisible. continuity. This real time we find in our experiences. It is Intellect that makes cuts in it, spatializes it and falsely represents it as a straight line with discrete moments as its points. Thus real time we. cannot think, 'we must live it because life transcends intellect.'!?.
As against Bergson, Alexander maintains that space and time are so intimately interrelated that one cannot be understood without reference to the other. When viewed thus, the contradictions allegedly found in them would no longer remain. Space-Time, says Alexander, is the 'stuff of which things are fashioned. This is interpreted in the sense that Space-Time is identical with Pure Motion. This again amounts to saying that a thing is a complex of motions."
A. N. Whitehead is a philosopher of change par excellence. He agrees with Bergson on the point that our experience is of duration and that instants are the abstractions made by science (i.e. intellect). But he differs from Bergson in not declaring that only duration is real and an 'instant' is a “fiction' or 'convention' because he feels that in doing so one cuts all connections between experience and science - which he is not prepared to do."
Now let us see, in a general way, what Einstein has said about time. Wildon Carr writes : "The principle of relativity declares that there is no absolute magnitude, that there exists nothing whatever which can claim to be great or small in its own nature, also there is no absolute duration, nothing whatever which in its own nature is short or long. I co-ordinate my universe from my own standpoint of rest in a system of reference in relation to which all else is moving...Space and Time are not containers nor are they contents but variants.'20 ‘The chief novelty of Einstein's theory is the conception of the relativity of simultaneity... If we grasp the relativity of simultaneity, there is little difficulty in seeing that the measurable physical duration (or elapsed time) of any event depends upon the velocity of the centre from which it is measured...The theory of
