But now we speak of a development through an infinite principle; hence we may expect that freedom must here be thought by us under another determination; and these two different spheres must on no account be taken the one for the other until we shall be able to give their characteristic difference.
These manifestations of the principle absolutely exclude each other, and it is absolutely impossible that if the one occurs, any other one should occur. Hence if a new manifestation is to occur, the previous one must first have been annihilated and canceled; they can follow only in succession. The annihilation of the one which is, is the condition of the possibility of the being of the other; and hence the former is first, and the second one succeeds. Thus that which remains always one and the same, proceeds through a series of successive changes, or through a time. This series never has an end, for the principle can become a principle infinitely. Thus we arrive at an infinite time. This one-and-the-same remaining has only onedimension, for it is itself an infinite succession of reciprocally excluding contents. The contents are not themselves the moments of time, for as parts of the one and same time they are altogether equal, but they make it possible to distinguish something in time. That which bears time, and forms its point of unity is the principle; the contents of the time and the points of disjunction are the manifestations of that principle.
Now what did our problem propose to picture? Evidently merely the principle in its actual state of being a principle, but our problem did not at all propose to picture time. The picture of time came of itself and joined itself of its own accord to that picture of the principle as soon as we tried to form the latter. Hence we mast express it thus: time is a law of that picturing which we are trying to discover, and its peculiar character as such law is this, that it does not confine and enchain us unseen and unconsciously—as the laws of thinking very often do—but that, while it binds us, it also represents itself to us in an image or picture. We must, therefore, furthermore try to explain this consciousness of time which enters our mind of its own accord.
Whenever freedom elevates itself actually and in fact over any limitation wherein it was previously confined, there arises a consciousness as the immediate being of this new-arisen freedom. This is a proposition which we have established above and from which we have drawn many conclusions already. Let us now apply this proposition to the present instance. Our problem was to construct that principle by means of free imagination. Now, in doing this, imagination has already risen above its state of actually being such a principle; and hence the life of consciousness is, during that constructing, surrendered neither to its lower condition of being a principle, nor to a contemplation of the manifestations of that principle. Now this unsurrendered condition of life—which has arisen by means of the free act whereby consciousness determined itself to construct the principle—represents itself in a consciousness which, as the immediate expression of an inner condition, must appear as a given (not free) consciousness. This representation, or the immediate contemplation of the pure principle absolutely as such, is what is called time.
Illustration.—Do we by a free act produce time or not? We do not produce it by a conscious freedom of imagination as we produce, for instance, the required picture of the principle; but we do produce the ground of the contemplation of time, which ground is our arising beyond the condition of actually being principle by means of our imagination. At least, this is all the answer we can now give to that/question; the final and decisive answer will appear only in the Science of Knowledge.
In the foregoing we have deduced merely the pure form of time, empty of all appearance; and this happened because our problem of a free thinking led us out of the natural progress of consciousness. But whatever reasons we may have had thus to proceed in the development of our subject, we must now turn back to its natural connection and show how consciousness arrives at an actual time.