But for all their vagueness, for all their lack of definition, these controlling presences, these sources of power, these things with an inner life, with their own richness of content, these beings, with the destiny of the world hidden in their natures, are what we want to know about. As we cross a road busy with traffic, we see the colours of their occupants; but at the moment we are absorbed in using this immediate show as a symbol for the forces determining the immediate future.
--Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
--Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
There are two competing aesthetics of temporality in modernism, one "spatialized," its model of time marked by breaks and often attacked as "static"; the other a celebration of movement and speed. Their points of reference are competing conceptions of time. Recent commentators on British modernism usually have seen both these philosophies as continental. Leaving aside Martin Heidegger, whose Sein und Zeit (1927 [Being and time]), while certainly one important expression of the period's preoccupation with time, was not a direct influence on any of the modernists writing in English, the two currents are generally attached to Hegelianism and Bergsonism, respectively. Critics have had little to say about any specifically British philosophies of time and any controversies about time in England in the first decades of this century. 1 Yet an immersion in the intellectual life of the period leads to the discovery of a debate about time that counterposes two British philosophies of time, both equally hostile to Bergson. One is Hegelian and the other, while anti-Hegelian, could be said to incorporate important features of Hegelian idealism in the cause of a new realism. In particular, it relates a spatialized and seemingly still time to a theory of change. The locus of the debate was Cambridge; its protagonists were largely members of the Cambridge Apostles, the philosophical society that included Alfred North Whitehead, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and, briefly, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The young Apostle John Maynard Keynes, who had attended J. M. McTaggart's lectures, delivered a paper on "Time" to the Society in 1903. 2 The Apostles included Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and E. M. Forster, which suggests that this time-thinking may have had repercussions beyond the immediate circle of Cambridge philosophy.
To the extent that one can claim the existence of a coherent Cambridge philosophy of time, it developed as part of the project Moore called in 1903 "The Refutation of Idealism," for there were British Hegelians, the most preeminent of which was Oxford's F. H. Bradley. The Apostle J. M. McTaggart, "the idealist philosopher Cambridge took seriously," 3 had, like Bradley, maintained that time is unreal, which Moore found "a perfectly monstrous proposition." 4 McTaggart had published "The Unreality of Time" in Mind in 1908, but 1927 saw the publication of Sein und Zeit as well as the posthumous appearance of McTaggart's account of time in The Nature of Existence. 5 It coincided with a series of publications at least partly addressing the subject of time in the wake of Einstein's general theory of relativity: Whitehead's The Principle of Relativity , C. D. Broad's Scientific Thought , Jean Nicod's La Geométrie dans le monde sensible , and Arthur Eddington's Mathematical Theory of Relativity . 6 1927 was also the publication date of Russell's The Analysis of Matter, partly delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926. The debate generated interest beyond the philosophical world. Leonard Woolf asked Russell in 1926 to review Whitehead's Science and the Modern World for The Nation and Athenaeum, as he had asked him to review Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature; both reviews discuss time. 7 Wyndham Lewis's idiosyncratic Time and Western Man on what Lewis calls "contemporary time-philosophy" likewise registers these wider repercussions, as does Forster's Aspects of the Novel, his 1927 Clark lectures also given at Trinity. There Forster writes that "in the novel, the allegiance to time is imperative. . . . Whereas in daily life . . . the experience of certain mystics suggests, indeed, that it is not necessary." 8 The year 1927, then, also that of the publication of To the Lighthouse, represents the culmination of a period of intense interest in time. Virginia Woolf's novel was its major artistic expression.
When Woolf's heroine in Night and Day , who secretly studies mathematics and wishes to be an astronomer, decided "she would force herself to think out the problem of the future, or some mathematical problem," 9 Woolf explicitly singled out and named one aspect of the problem of time, what C. D. Broad pronounces "the hardest knot in the whole of philosophy." 10 The problem of the future was already an ancient problem, that of the future contingent: "Aristotle's question whether it is now true that there either will be or will not be a sea t tomorrow," which is set forth in chapter nine of Aristotle's De Interpretatione and taken up in the Master Argument of Diodorus Cronus. 11 Diodorus, W. and M. Kneale write, "maintains that all true statements about the future are necessary" as "a consequence of what is admitted by Aristotle, namely the necessity of the past." 12 Jaakko Hintikka summarizes its usual interpretation: it will either be true that a sea t will take place tomorrow or that it will not. If it does, then it is already true. How then can tomorrow's sea t be contingent? "Hence the unrestricted application of tertium non datur [the law of the excluded middle] to statements about future events seems to commit us to holding that all future events are predetermined." 13
At stake then is the question of determinism, one more generally raised by the debate about physical time as is apparent in the English title of Bergson's Time and Free Will , translated, significantly, by an Oxford philosopher, F. L. Pogson. 14 "I have never read Bergson," Woolf wrote to Harmon H. Goldstone in 1932. 15 This does not mean she was unfamiliar with Bergson's work, however. A letter of Lytton Strachey records her attendance "crouching" at a 1913 Aristotelian Society meeting where Bertrand Russell's niece Karin Costelloe, to become her sister-in-law Karin Stephen, presented a paper on Bergson. 16 But it was not Costelloe-Stephen's "praise of Bergson" 17 that generated Strachey's excitement; it was, he wrote, Russell's "pungent criticisms," along with those of Moore, "the very opposite of brilliant--appallingly sensible, and so easy to understand that you wondered why on earth no one else had thought of it." 18 If Woolf knew Bergson, it was through Cambridge thinking on time. The question of determinism and free will had its place in the philosophical tradition her father had surveyed in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, in David Hume's discussion of the liberty of the will in A Treatise of Human Nature, and in Thomas Hobbes's discussion of the problem of the future. 19 As a result, the whole of To the Lighthouse, even its title, is organized around the problem of the future.
Bertie Russell is here. . . . I do want him to work in the knowledge of the Absolute, in the knowledge of eternity. He will--apart from philosophical mathematics--be so temporal, so immediate. He won't let go, he won't act in the eternal things, when it comes to men and life. He is coming to have a real, actual, logical belief in Eternity. . . . We mustn't lapse into temporality.
--D. H. Lawrence to Ottoline Morrell
Idealism held, along with Bergson, that physical time--the time recorded by clocks--is timeless. McTaggart represented it as "the B series," where the positions are related by being earlier than some and later than others (NE, 2:9). But here the two philosophies parted company. The Bergsonian version of real time was duration, the flow of interpenetrating moments. Idealism's version, if it did not insist on "interpenetration," did see the movement from past to present to future represented by the tenses as essential to temporality. Only, McTaggart argued the unreality "of tense and of the flow of time," as D. H. Mellor puts it, that the relations of past, present, and future are self-contradictory. 20 "McTaggart's proof," Mellor writes, "is very simple. Many A series positions are incompatible with each other. An event which is yesterday, for example, cannot also be tomorrow. . . . Everything occupies every A series position, from the remotest future, through the present, to the remotest past. But nothing can really have incompatible properties," so nothing can in reality be past, present or future (RT, 92-3, emphasis in original). E.g., a particular occasion of inclement weather may be represented by the propositions "it will rain tomorrow," "it is raining now," and "it rained yesterday," depending on when the statements occur. This entails that for an event to be "in time," it must possess "incompatible determinations," i.e., if it "is past, it has been present and future" (NE, 2:20). "It follows," McTaggart argues, "that there can be no change unless some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false." He gives as an example "'it is now raining'" (NE, 2:15).
Russell defended a position "in the middle," "pierced" on both sides, "like St. Sebastian," by time's arrow and its flight. 21 He conceded that A-series "events are not eternally past or eternally present or eternally future, but change in these respects" (CPBR, 9:261). He agreed that "[s]uch a statement as 'it is raining' is sometimes true and sometimes false" (HWP, 588). Moore had likewise observed that "whenever we use the present tense in its primary sense, it seems to me plain that . . . we do mean something different by it each time we use it. . . . [a]nd similarly with the past and future tenses," and that "if I say 'It will rain tomorrow,' these words have a different meaning today from what they would have if I used them tomorrow." 22 But Russell locates this A-series characteristic in something extraneous to time: "past, present and future arise from time-relations of subject and object, while earlier and later arise from time-relations of object and object." 23 Russell "reject[s] the A series," McTaggart says in summarizing him, because "past, present, and future do not belong to time per se, but only in relation to a knowing subject. . . . If there were no consciousness, there would be events which were earlier or later than others, but nothing would be in any sense past, present, or future" (NE, 2:13-4). The removal of the subjective element yields the B series: crucially for Russell the order of the two series is the same, which permits them to be "correlated." 24 The notion is central to Russell's claimed solution: a particular present event is earlier than a future one and the logical relation of "earlier or later than" holding between the two events does not change when the present event becomes past. This is the permanence of the logical relations of the B series: "If M is earlier than N, it is always earlier" (NE, 2:10). Russell does not agree with McTaggart, however, that "if we remove the A series" from the B series, "we are left with a series which is not temporal" (NE, 2:15). It is true that time is frozen thereby into an unchanging series, but it nonetheless represents change: "this eternal passing and flowing," as Woolf would write,"was struck into stability." 25 Russell's solution will require representing contingent statements about the future in the same way as it represents those about the past. All time statements are thus endowed with the logical "necessity of the past," including those about the future. Logical necessity, however, is not determinism.
[G]iving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking--one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse. [TL, 26]
McTaggart's problem for Russell is ultimately one of language, "a mere confusion due to the unfortunate fact that verbs have tenses" (CPBR, 9:262). Assuming "past, present and future are relations," the problem is "to define the term to which they are to be related, since this term must be continually changing" (CPBR, 9:261). This "relatum" Russell calls "an ambiguous proper name" whose referent is something momentary, e.g. "this" or "now" (CPBR, 9:262). These are the terms linguistics calls "deictics" or "shifters." They shift reference with each use. In "On the Experience of Time," Russell makes "now" the key to the past-present-future series; "present time" is "a class of all entities that are now." 26 The shifting "now" contrasts with dates, which denote fixed times. Absolute dates, like those famous ones Woolf inserts into certain texts, "the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twentyeight" 27 or "the morning of the twenty-sixth of October 1928," 28 are not given in experience. Only relative order is, because "we cannot point to a time itself, but only to some event occurring at that time." 29 As Mellor remarks, "Dates form a series . . . which is not the A-series" (RT, 19). In translating experienced into physical time, each "now" is correlated with a date. "I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present--at least enough of the present to serve as platform to stand upon," Woolf explains of the autobiographical impulse that connects the two. 30 Mellor calls the A series "tensed" by contrast with the "tenseless" view of time: "'tensed statements,'" according to Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, "reflect a given temporal perspective" by "the grammatical tense of a verb or in the use of some such term as 'past,' 'present,' 'future,' 'now,' 'then,' 'yesterday,' 'next year,' 'the month after next,' 'in a short while,' 'a long time ago,' etc." 31 Note that these terms are deictics. Tense in this view becomes the essence of temporal deictics. Russell's alternative sees tense as a special case of the deictic's built-in subjectivity. Since we will argue there are linguistic tenses with no "temporal perspective," in Le Poidevin and MacBeath's sense, we will distinguish "deictic" from "nondeictic" tense. Making deixis and not tense the defining category--where deixis includes both temporal and spatial forms--and allowing nondeictic tense to represent B-series time relations is a version of the spatial analogy with time. Bergson, who rejects the abstract time of physics as "spatialized," holds the tensed view.
The uniqueness of Russell's position is to defend a spatialized notion of time not as timeless but as the goal of a knowledge of time "by description." Since it is achieved by "correlating" the "nows" that are directly apprehended objects of "knowledge by acquaintance" with fixed positions in the B series, Russell's solution, like Moore's, thus requires a language in which the "shifting" deictic terms are replaced in propositions about time. 32 This includes tensed propositions. "Mr. Russell holds that such propositions are ambiguous, and that to make them definite we must substitute propositions which are always true or always false," e.g., "'the fall of rain is simultaneous with this judgment,'" McTaggart continues (NE, 2:165). Russell thinks it impossible "to arrive at a just philosophy of time except by employing verbs in a sense divorced from tense." Only then can one "say that past, present, and future are [in a sense without tense] all equally real; what is false is to say that the future 'is' when 'is' means 'is now'" (CPBR, 9:262; Russell's brackets).
The "is now" Moore calls "the present tense in its primary sense." It "express[es] the idea that a given event is contemporary with our actual use of it," i.e., with the speech act (PS, 136). It is a deictic present. Russell creates a "tenseless," i.e., nondeictic present by making it cotemporal not with a present deictic but with a fixed time adverbial, e.g., "'It will rain tomorrow' is one of the class of propositions 'It rains at time t,' where t is different times." (LK, 255) In "[t]he statement that a thing exists at time t," Russell explains, "'exists' is used without tense" (CPBR, 9:262). Arguing, as he says, against William James's claim that "truths are mutable," Moore similarly distinguishes between "ideas" and "words" (PS, 134 ff.). Hence, as Mellor presents it, McTaggart's claim about the unreality of time is really about tense: "nothing in reality has tenses" (RT, 93). We only stipulate that tense means deixis. Russell's solution requires a notion of change not dependent on deictic or shifting tense, as put forth in his Principles of Mathematics, section 442. Peter Geach has called this notion "Cambridge changes": "An object O is said to 'change' in this sense if and only if there are two propositions about O, differing only in that one mentions an earlier and the other a later time, and one is true, the other false." 33 Thus, if "it is raining on 1 May 1996" is true of the weather on that date but "it is raining on 2 May 1996" is not, the weather can be said to have changed. "That is to say," McTaggart comments, "there is change, on Mr. Russell's view, if the proposition 'at the time T my poker is hot' is true, and the proposition 'at the time T' my poker is hot' is false." (NE, 2:14)
Russell's use of the present "exists" or "is" "without tense" represents events in time with the same verbal form as universal truths. Universal statements such as "All men are mortal" use the "generic" or "eternal" present, whose "is," as Russell says, cannot mean "is now." The difference is grammatical as well: the generic present cannot co-occur with "now," nor, in English, take the progressive aspect; we cannot say "Two plus two is now (being) four" or "All men are being mortal" as we can "All dissidents are being arrested" or "The men are being silly." 34 Moore calls it the "timeless sense of the word 'is'": "beside the things which have been, are now, and will be, there are many other things also belonging to the Universe, which are and yet are not now." 35
When Russell asserts that "it is raining" may be sometimes true and sometimes false, he adds, "but 'two and two are four' is always true" (HWP, 588). Here "always" means "for all times," i.e., in every possible world. When, in Russell's solution, past, present, and future statements with changing truth values are exchanged for permanent or always true statements at time t, when, in other words, the shifting "now" is exchanged for a fixed or rigidly designated instant of clock time expressible by a numerical hour or date, which is the same operation that exchanges names for particulars by descriptions, their nondeictic present becomes indistinguishable from that of universal statements. Yet the permanence or tenselessness of universals is different from the atemporality of nondeictic time statements, as is demonstrable grammatically. For the generic present, incompatible with shifters like "now," is also incompatible with adverbials like "at time t"; "two and two is four at time t" is equally impossible. Universals cannot be said to be at "any particular time," whether shifting or fixed (PP, 98). Universals have being, but things in time exist: the word "exist" is taken to mean "'being at some part of the time-series.'" 36 Herein lies the difference between the atemporal permanence of universals and the permanent, nondeictic, temporal relations of empirical facts. The latter are always true in some actual world. Moreover, being fixed to a time, each fact about an event enters into relation with other such facts, namely the relation of earlier and later that erects them into an ordered series, whereas generic statements are unordered with respect to one another. This is what it means to say they hold at no particular time.
Russell later adopts an alternative to the nondeictic (Mellor's "tenseless") present: "the language of physics," he says, translates "A meteor is visible now" into "A meteor was visible at 8h. 43m. G.M.T.," substituting a past tense for the now-less present. The "was" Russell characterizes as "intended to be without tense," in this, the time-bound counterpart to the generic present. 37 Unlike the latter, it refers to a fact, unchanging in that it is independent of any subject's (or any shifting term's) relation to it yet somewhere in the time-series. "'There was an eclipse of the sun on April 17, 1912' expresses now exactly the same objective fact as was expressed before that date by 'There will be an eclipse of the sun on April 17, 1912.' The difference between these two sentences lies solely in the time-relation asserted to hold between the subject and the event concerned" (TK, 106).
The confusion arises because the "European languages," Russell says, "are absolutely destitute of means of speaking of an event without indicating its temporal relation to the speaker," i.e., to a "now," and therefore "there is no way of expressing the eternity of the fact as opposed to the transiency of the event" (TK, 107). 38 This "gross incapacity of the languages spoken by western philosophers" is not universally the case, however (TK, 107). There exists a "historical" or "narrative" past, like Russell's past "without tense"--our nondeictic past--e.g. the French aorist, preterite, or passé simple. 39 Its uses are written, "literary"; 40 it is the tense used in the French novel, that "narrative past" that for Roland Barthes links "writing and the novel." 41 The passé simple, like the generic present, cannot co-occur with deictics, but it can occur with time adverbials like "at time t." 42 It expresses the permanence of the relation of earlier or later without reference to the speaker's time. "Now one thought of it," Mrs. Ramsay reflects on "this night," "cleared of chatter and emotion, it seemed always to have been, only was shown now and so being shown, struck everything into stability" (TL, 170). Perhaps this is why McTaggart says of Russell's position that "if there were events earlier than any consciousness, those events would never be future or present, though they could be past" (NE, 2:13-14). Russell in effect makes all propositions about events in time statements about the past.
The clear-cut distinctions permitted by the grammar of French are detectable in English. "'Each tense,' said Neville, 'means differently. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences.'" 43 In "Time Passes," the seven sets of sentences between brackets are translatable by the historical past: "[Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was midnight.]" (TL, 192) "[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]" (TL, 194) "[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father's arm, was given in marriage. . . .]" (TL, 198). "[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. . . .]" (TL, 199) "[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]" (TL, 201) "[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring. . . .]" (TL, 202) "[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September.]" (TL, 213) The French translation of To the Lighthouse renders them all in the passé simple. 44 It is striking that in the version of "Time Passes" that Charles Mauron translated in 1926, which begins with the passé simple "Il fit plus sombre," these sentences are missing. 45 Their possibly late addition en bloc suggests that they encapsulate for Woolf the passage of time the section as a whole presents, recording irreversible events: Mr. Carmichael's blowing out the last candle at midnight, Prue Ramsay's marriage, Mrs. Ramsay's death, then Prue's in childbirth, and Andrew's "in battle," Mr. Carmichael's publication of his war poetry, and Lily Briscoe's return to the house. One wedding, three deaths, three insignificant acts, flattened in an arbitrary series. Death is revealed to be as inevitable as the weather.
The peculiar "necessity of the past," as Russell presents it, is expressed by the permanence of nondeictic time-statements about individual events. Their "necessity" is not that of classic, necessary propositions in the generic present, which is what Moore has in mind when he states that propositions where "the distinction between 'This is' and 'This was' is disregarded" must "involve necessity." 46 The latter hold for all worlds, all times. The nondeictic past, however, means that "such-and-such an event happened at such-and-such a time" is always true and not that "such-and-such an event happens" is always true; such statements represent possibilities actualized in some world, i.e., at some time. The distinction is like Hintikka's between "omnitemporality" and "eternity" (TN, 83-4). Aristotle's problem, he thinks, is that of "omnitemporal truth": "that statements about individual future events have always been true if they are true at all, and always false if false at all" and that they are "true or false necessarily" but not true necessarily or false necessarily (TN, 153, emphasis in original).
If we infer to-day from yesterday, we may equally infer yesterday from to-day. We may run backwards or forwards, by the same right along the chain of causes. If I am a "necessary" consequence, given the atoms, the atoms were a "necessary" antecedent, given me.
Leslie Stephen, "What Is Materialism?"
Russell rejects McTaggart's "contention that time is unreal" "as based upon fallacious reasoning" (OK, 171). His nondeictic series avoids the contradictions of the deictic A series. But, McTaggart argues, it commits Russell to a timeless vision in which the future is determined. If Russell "is right, all judgments are either always true, or always false. Then, I maintain, no facts change" (NE, 2:16). Russell admits that "there is some sense . . . in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought" (OK, 171). 47 This is apparent in Russell's rejection of the Humean dismissal of causality. To understand science's causality, one must "shut out, by an effort, everything that differentiates between past and future" (OK, 227). 48 It is "better to allow the effect to be before the cause or simultaneous with it, because nothing of any scientific importance depends upon its being after the cause" (OK, 229). One can claim that "the future 'determines' the past in exactly the same sense in which the past 'determines' the future" if "[t]he word 'determine,' here, has a purely logical significance," i.e., the "logical necessity" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus 5.1362 (ML, 189). 49
Science substitutes for "the trivial principle 'same cause, same effect,'" Newton's "uniformity of nature," i.e., "the principle of the permanence of laws" (ML, 190). The laws concerned involve the nomological relations of the "world of universals" or of "being": "it is not in any sameness of causes and effects that the constancy of scientific law consists, but in the sameness of relations" (ML, 188)--"always the relation of cause and effect, not the cause itself" (OK, 235, emphasis in original). One interpretation of the "uniformity of nature" is "the irrelevance of time," the principle that "no law involves the time as argument" (ML, 198). Permanence here means eternity not omnitemporality, the eternal present and not the nondeictic past. To what degree does the principle hold for the future; can one "infer the future from the past"? (ML, 192) Russell admits it is possible "that all inferences as to the future are in fact invalid" (OK, 225), perhaps as a concession to Tractatus 5.136: "There is no causal nexus which justifies such an inference"; and 5.13161: "The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present." "I do not see how such a view could be disproved," Russell concedes (OK, 225). But to the degree that "inferences as to the future are valid, what principle must be involved in making them?" Russell asks (OK, 225, emphasis in original). His answer borrows from Keynes's work on probability, for the predictability of future events concerned the economist. 50 Assuming the uniformity of nature, the future is inferred from the past not by the law of causality but by "the principle of induction": "an empirical generalisation from a number of laws which are themselves empirical generalisations" (ML, 189), it nevertheless goes beyond the empirical, since "the observed cases of the truth of causal laws afford no presumption as to the unobserved cases" (OK, 225-6). "Prediction" is one name for this knowledge of the future. But science also makes predictions about the past for which memory is lacking, that covered by Mrs. Swithin's Outline of History in Between the Acts. 51 So not just future knowledge is at stake. The principle of induction permits us to "infer that any characteristic of the whole of the observed past is likely to apply to the future and to the unobserved past" (OK, 225). The "laws of probable sequence" are not necessary, however; "any . . . sufficiently frequent sequence will be causal," so, unlike Mill, "we shall not refuse to say that night is the cause of day" (ML, 187, emphasis in original).
The question of the present "existence" of the future for Russell seems then only a special case of the existence of the unobserved. Real time includes an unobserved but not necessarily unknown time, if knowledge is not restricted to acquaintance or direct apprehension but allows knowledge by description. The compact series of "instants of time" means we "either bring in events wholly outside our experience or assume that experienced events have parts which we do not experience, or postulate that we can experience an infinite number of events at once" (OK, 126). Broad had tried to treat the future differently from the past, claiming that "judgments which profess to be about the future" in fact "do not refer to any fact, whether positive or negative, at the time when they are made" (ST, 73). Hence, "the Law of Excluded Middle does not apply to all judgments," namely not to those about the future. "Dr. Broad's theory," McTaggart objects, "would involve that 'it will rain to-morrow' is neither true nor false," whereas "[i]t seems to me quite certain that 'it will rain to-morrow' is either true or false" (NE, 2:24). Russell's objection is twofold: future and past only differ in the A series by virtue of its deictic point of reference and by virtue of the differing nature of knowledge of the past and of the future. "Mr. Broad's contention that the time-series essentially has sense from earlier to later, rather than vice-versa," Russell thinks, "amounts merely to the empirical fact that memory only works one way. There is no reason, except brute fact, why we should not remember the future as well as the past" (CPBR, 9:262).
The future is determined, Russell thus concedes, but only to the degree the past is. "You cannot make the past other than it was--true, but this is a mere application of the law of contradiction. . . . But also you cannot make the future other than it will be; this again is an application of the law of contradiction" (ML, 195). In any case, knowledge of neither future nor past makes them what they are: "the supposed prevision would not create the future any more than memory creates the past." The problem is a "confusion of thought, due to the feeling that knowledge compels the happening of what it knows when this is future," but "knowledge has no such power in regard to the past" (OK, 239, emphasis in original). But, Russell counters, the past could "have been different if our present wishes had been different," concluding, "the past cannot be different from what it was, but no more can our present wishes be different from what they are; this again is merely the law of contradiction" (ML, 196). This is the burden of Tractatus 5.1362: "The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now. We could only know them if causality were an inner necessity, like that of logical deduction.--The connexion of knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity." Freedom lies strangely in the limits of knowledge, in agnosticism. Or, in Henry Le Roy Finch's reading, knowledge, insofar as its connection to the world is governed by logic, is independent of any knowing subject, but willing is not. One cannot "know" anything that is not something there is. So what is known has to be what there is. But there is no logical necessity that the world is what is willed: "The world is independent of my will" (Tractatus 6.373). Hence, freedom does not bear on knowledge. 52
The vision involves, then, a certain determinism. Mrs. Ramsay, observing "the long steady stroke" of the lighthouse clock, repeats the future contingent "it will end, it will end . . . . It will come," to transform it into a fatal "what will be will be" (TL, 97). The early Russell rejected the distinction between the necessary and the contingent in holding "that all propositions are necessary." 53 "Everything is in a sense a mere fact," he claimed, and "there seems to be no true proposition of which it makes sense to say that it might have been false. . . . What is true, is true; what is false, is false; and concerning fundamentals, there is nothing more to be said." 54 In the Russellian solution to the problem of the future, the Platonism of the early logic is projected onto the conception of time; the impressionist world of existence is struck into stability by the logical world of universals. "In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen," reads Tractatus 6.41. But alongside this is the truth that "all happening and being-so is accidental." "What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world" but must lie "outside the world" (Tractatus 6.41, emphasis in original). This is the distanced position outside time from which the future becomes one with the past and the order of causality is discernable.
Men of the past were often parochial in space, but the dominant men of our age are parochial in time. They feel for the past a contempt that it does not deserve, and for the present a respect that it deserves still less.
Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
The future in Woolf's metaphor of the "piece of glass" has Broad's transparency, but only from within time.   55 The metaphor is echoed in Jacob's Room: "We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our pane of glass." 56 We begin blank, with the "uncompromising white stare" of Lily's canvas (TL, 234) or "[t]he blankness of the white table-cloth" that "glares" (W, 118), reflecting "the blankness of her mind" upon awakening (TL, 217), or when looking "blankly" at the canvas (TL, 234).  There!" 57 A new present's coming into existence is sudden, violent, unexpected, "something tremendous about to happen" like a shot going off, recomposing the moment (MD, 104); 58 "the room . . . wears the wavering, unreal appearance of a place where one waits expecting something to happen. Things quiver as if not yet in being" (W, 118). The expectation is that nonetheless the present will proceed from the past; the transparency is a feature of incomplete knowledge. This is not unlike Whitehead's formulation:
The present fact is luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago. Unsuspected factors may have intervened; dynamite may have exploded. But, however that may be, the present event issues subject to the limitations laid upon it by the actual nature of the immediate past. 59
A full knowledge of it is thus one that seizes what should have been predictable in it.
"Life" is "made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one"; experience is atomized, not continuous (TL, 73). The unfolding series, governed by probability, is at once causal and contingent. To know the series is the goal, which requires going beyond the moment. One moment is replaced by another as "Time Passes," yet each moment in the series explodes into existence out of nothing, like night into day, a kind of big bang theory of time passing:
How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flash of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. . . . The woods throb blue and green [W, 286].
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of grass; blows out into tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the gauze of the air and the grasses and pools. . . . And the light mounts over the faces of the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew. Sunlight strikes the shaving-glasses; and gleaming glass cans . . . vanquished chaos [JR, 163].
The freedom that arises from incomplete knowledge within time is the desire that the world be other than it is. Russell conceives--contra Bergson, who wishes to consider all things "sub specie durationis" 60 --another freedom, the freedom from time: "The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and a now" (PP, 160). "Physics views space-time impartially, as God might be supposed to view it." 61 What is demanded is a maximization of knowledge, to "know all," where "all" includes the future. Geach, discussing McTaggart's paradox, finds "an observer who contemplates the whole of a space" the conception the spatial analogy with time permits: "what on the level of the travellers looks like a succession, from the high citadel of eternity looks like a series spread out and simultaneously viewable." 62 For Russell, that no subject in time can adopt that perspective until the future is past is a "mere accident" (OK, 238). The observer outside time grasps the relations of events by a kind of predictive retrospect. Even "earlier or later than" are emptied of directionality, like "to the left of" and "to the right of." Russell's realism adopts the idealist Bradley's position that "the direction, and the distinction between past and future" is an appearance that "depends entirely on our experience." 63 The knowledge of time begins in the "now," but it must renounce this home if it is to achieve a sweeping view of history. Bradley had pronounced that "know[ing] the past and future as such is a hard and late achievement of the mind" that "implies an enormous degradation of the present." Yet "past and future do not and cannot exist for us until reality appears as a series in which the present has sunk and has become but one member among others." 64 Russell only distances himself from Bradley in permitting no nostalgia for the "now" from which the knowledge of the time-series distances the subject. For what Bradley regrets as the "degradation of the present" makes real knowledge, knowledge by description, possible.
If she went by the Strand she would force herself to think out the problem of the future, or some mathematical problem; if she went by the river she would certainly begin to think about things that didn't exist--the forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the magnanimous hero [ND, 270].
The problem of the future structures all of To the Lighthouse. Raised in the opening sentence by the incomplete proposition "if it's fine tomorrow," the novel's title forms an element of the proposition's completion (TL, 9). The opening sentence and title are only two tips of the iceberg of a theory of time and change submerged in the book whose source is Cambridge. It takes the form of the question of "the wetness or fineness of to-morrow," which we now recognize as the typical example for the future contingent: Broad's examples--"To-morrow will be wet" or "It will rain" (ST, 72-3, 77)--like Moore's and Russell's "It will rain tomorrow" (LK, 255), and even McTaggart's present "it is now raining" (NE, 2:15). 65 The proposition occurs throughout the first part of the novel in various modalities: "'But,' said his father . . . 'it won't be fine'" (TL, 10). "'But it may be fine--I expect it will be fine,' said Mrs. Ramsay, making some twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all . . ." (TL, 11); "it might be fine tomorrow. So it might" (TL, 50). "'Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow,' she said." (TL, 26) "If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything seemed possible." (TL, 157) "'It's due west,' said the atheist Tansley. . . . That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse." (TL, 12) In part three, "'[i]t will rain,'" James "remembered his father saying. 'You won't be able to go to the Lighthouse'" (TL, 276). The future is the realm of the possible: "It is possible that it may rain tomorrow" (LK, 255). Only time will tell, where "tell" means to narrate in the time-series. Mrs. Ramsay's position at the transparent window is then related to the uncertainty of the future in the form of the weather. At the end of "The Window" the theme reoccurs as Mrs. Ramsay again "looked out of the window" (TL, 185-6).
Between the Acts likewise raises the truth or falsehood of a weather forecast at the start: "'If it's fine,' Mrs. Swithin continued, 'they'll act on the terrace . . .' 'And if it's wet,' Bartholomew continued, 'in the Barn.' 'And which will it be?' Mrs. Swithin continued. 'Wet or fine?' Then, for the seventh time in succession, they both looked out of the window" (BA, 22, ellipsis in original).
The partial proposition about the morrow's weather hidden in To the Lighthouse's opening lines refers to the "sort of a fact . . . expressed by the hypothetical sentence" such as "If it rains tomorrow we shan't be able to have our picnic," Moore's example in the 1910 lectures. 66 It consists of the antecedent of a conditional whose consequent contains the novel's title: "'Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, we shall go to the lighthouse'" (TL, 9). The "if" clause functions as the answer to a question posed just prior to the novel's first line, a question repeated later: "In a moment he would ask her, 'Are we going to the Lighthouse? And she would have to say, 'No: not tomorrow; your father says not'" (TL, 94-5).
The same Diodorus who elaborated the Master Argument was the first recorded logician "to debate the nature of conditional statements," according to Kneale and Kneale, and they connect his logical views on conditionals "with the denial of real contingency"; it "seems to have been the point of the Master Argument," which is perhaps "directed especially against Aristotle's thesis in chapter 9 of De Interpretatione." 67 The ancient debate underlies To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts. The propositional function represented by Mr. Ramsay's reasonings is the "implicative function" whose symbolism is "p q" in Principia Mathematica, using one of those "twisted bars" that "came before [the] eyes" of Night and Day's heroine (ND, 300), to be read "if p, then q." 68 "If Q then is Q--R--. . . . 'Then R. . . ,'" Mr. Ramsay thinks (TL, 54).
In both To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, the deictic tensed statement "It will be fine tomorrow" and its negation counterpose two mutually exclusive interpretations of the world. Lily "with the Ramsays" is "made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together" in the mind (TL, 154). Both cannot be true without violating the principle of noncontradiction. Woolf underscores their incompatibility by making one male and the other female. Mr. Ramsay negates the fact of light and sunshine; so also Charles Tansley: "'No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mrs. Ramsay,' he said" (TL, 129); Mrs. Ramsay, however, asserts it. When Minta and Paul are "wondering about the weather" and Mrs. Ramsay observes that "'There isn't a cloud anywhere for miles,'" "she could feel little Charles Tansley . . . snigger" (TL, 86). Hence, the weather is the subject of the quarrel between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay: "she flew in the face of facts. . . . 'Damn you,' he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might. Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west. . . . Then he said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won't rain: and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her" (TL, 50-1). Similarly, Mrs. Swithin hopes for the best and her brother expects the worst: "Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa heard the same words; about . . . the pageant and the weather" (BA, 22). The series of counterposed statements take the very form of the time series: "The same chime followed the same chime'" (BA, 22).
It both rains and does not rain in the course of To the Lighthouse. Hence, both judgments--"It is raining" and "It is not raining"--become true and remain so; in McTaggart's formulation, judgments "will become true or false when there is a fact for them to refer to; and after this they will remain true or false, as the case may be, for ever and ever" (NE, 2:23). It rains in the story of the Fisherman and his Wife that Mrs. Ramsay is reading James: "outside a great storm was raging and blowing" (TL, 93). It rains in the night of "Time Passes" that follows part one's day and it is fine on its morrow. Once the "downpouring of immense darkness" begins, "[n]othing, it seemed, could survive the flood" (TL, 189, 191). The two forms of conditional arguments "If P then Q; but not-P; therefore not-Q" and "If P then Q; but P; therefore Q" are thus both demonstrated in To the Lighthouse: in part two, it is not fine, therefore they don't go to the lighthouse; in part three, it is fine, therefore they go to the lighthouse. Rain is the prognostication confirmed by the end of part one: "he was thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life" (TL, 95). "Would they go to the Lighthouse tomorrow? No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine day" (TL, 173). "'Yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able to go'" (TL, 186). The forecast that part two confirms is the contrary of the one that part three confirms: "Then he reminded them that they were going to the Lighthouse tomorrow" (TL, 222). Statement and contradiction, thesis and antithesis, are reflected in the very movement of the waves: "Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted" (BA, 215). But there is no rejection of the laws of logic because there is no "simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions" (ML, 9); it rains and does not rain, not simultaneously, but in time. "Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was--one or the other" (BA, 22). "'And even if it isn't fine tomorrow,' said Mrs. Ramsay . . . 'it will be another day'" (TL, 42). For the weather is "variable" over time: "'The forecast,' said Mr. Oliver, turning the pages till he found it, 'says: Variable winds; fair average temperature; rain at times.'" Then "they all looked at the sky to see whether the sky obeyed the meteorologist. Certainly the weather was variable. It was green in the garden; grey the next. Here came the sun. . . . Then in compassion it withdrew" (BA, 22-3). 69 In time variability--the shifting property incorporated by the deictics--congeals into one particular sequence, the one James "will remember . . . all his life" (TL, 95). The question asked of the clouds, "Was it their own law, or no law, they obeyed?" is that of the nature of scientific prediction and causation (BA, 23).
The contradictions of the novels' sentences are not left to stand, then. The voice Lily Briscoe hears "saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things" (TL, 40), like "[t]he relationship between your grandfather and mother" that Woolf describes to her nephew Julian Bell, "the flute voices of two birds in tune . . . only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity" (MB, 37), with "the mold of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things--the modern mind" (CE, 2:226) in which things are "incongruously coupled"--"they blend but do not mix" (CE, 2:223), is the sound of clocks striking. The contradictory judgments are resolved by their translation into fixed time statements. A plurality of propositions becomes only part of the whole truth of history. Because in it time passes, Woolf's art then cannot be read as embracing Bradley's logic, which, according to Russell, concludes that "all truth is self-contradictory." 70
The Universe may proceed by law, but it knows no justice. For its laws are those of cause and effect, not of right and wrong. Similarly, in the life that tragedy pictures, there may or may not be justice: but there must be law . . . if we are to feel that inevitability which a play needs in order to convince.
F. L. Lucas, Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics
[T]here is a pleasure in the recognition of order, of inevitability in relations . . . very near to the pleasure derived from the contemplation of intellectual constructions united by logical inevitability.
Roger Fry, The Artist and Psychoanalysis
There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.
Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing Greek"
The storm clouds of both novels also threaten war. There is perhaps an allusion to Aristotle's sea t and an evocation of the sinking of the Lusitania in "the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship . . . come, gone," in the "purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath" (TL, 201). For it is not the history of the weather that led Woolf to grapple with the problem of time. It is not the dampening of a picnic excursion that the caesura marked by "Time Passes" means to memorialize; it is not a solely rainy morrow that divides the text into an earlier and a later, a before and an after. The deaths it contains sever past from future. But Woolf makes Mrs. Ramsay's and Prue Ramsay's private deaths join, via Andrew's death "in battle," the war dead. For "[a]ll had been part of the fields of death" (TL, 270). "Time Passes" divides the prewar period from the postwar epoch. In her review of Night and Day, Katherine Mansfield had accused its "real world" of being "shut and sealed from us to-day," of being "unaware of what has been happening." 71 The reason Mansfield gave Middleton Murry for the novel's remoteness was that for it "'[t]he war never has been; that is what its message is.'" Mansfield felt, by contrast, "'that nothing can ever be the same--that, as artists, we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions, new moulds for our thoughts and feelings.'" 72 By the time of Jacob's Room, Woolf's fiction had registered that cataclysm.
That central event arguably made something like Russell's B-series concept of time's passing the appropriate "mould" for the postwar generation's "thoughts and feelings," its confrontation of both past and future. In this light, perhaps the clearest vision of the future wrested from the view of history as a series of irrevocable events is Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Just as the Tractatus was written within a world that had irrevocably passed, that of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so Keynes's work saw "Europe before the War," "this economic Eldorado . . . this economic Utopia," as definitively dead. 73 The famous opening of the book is a kind of elegy for its passing: "the law of diminishing returns was at last reasserting itself" against the belief in an inevitable progress (EC, 25). "What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!" (EC, 11) The past was evoked in order to discern in it a future that could only start from the acceptance of what had come to an end. "The clock cannot be set back" (EC, 37). The means of foreseeing how the future might be was first sought in the future unforeseen by those within that paradise now lost, the one already past in August, 1914, without "[t]he inhabitant of London" still "sipping his morning tea in bed" having yet realized it, like those peering blindly into the night of "Time Passes" (EC, 12). For
[t]he projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete practice [EC, 12].
But it is in his conclusion that the author of the Treatise on Probability shows most clearly how, faced with the uncertainty of the future, only a grasp of the necessary sequence of past events modernized as "the permanence of laws," with their inevitable consequences, offers any means of determining the course of history, of allowing the freedom to alter, even to plan, it.
We may still have time to reconsider our courses and to view the world with new eyes. For the immediate future events are taking charge, and the near destiny of Europe is no longer in the hands of any man. The events of the coming year will not be shaped by the deliberate acts of statesmen, but by the hidden currents, flowing continually beneath the surface of political history, of which no one can predict the outcome. In one way we can only influence these hidden currents--by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men's hearts and minds, must be the means.
In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. . . . Our power of feeling and caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. . . . We have been moved beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.
For these reasons the true voice of the new generation has not yet spoken, and silent opinion is not yet formed. To the formation of the general opinion of the future I dedicate this book [EC, 296-8, emphasis in original].
Only when, Whitehead writes, "[t]he present moment" ceases to be "all in all," ceases to inhibit "apprehension of the relevance of the future," only when continuity is imaginatively realized, Keynes suggests, can the knowledge that time passes relate past to future (S, 42).
Bloomsbury would have qualified the resulting vision of time as an irrevocable order as "Greek." One "very distant" cloud in Between the Acts's variable sky "had hardened to golden alabaster; was made of immortal marble" (BA, 23). It achieves the rigid immobility of Greek architecture or sculpture, "statuesque, noble, and eyeless" (JR, 170), what Paul Ricoeur calls "monumental time," "the time of authority-res" like Dr. Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway. 74 Mr. Ramsay's dogmatic predictions for the morrow's wet weather aim for this granite-hard quality that Leonard Woolf attributes to the "Stephenesque." There was, he explains, "something marmoreal or lapidary about their way of expressing those opinions, reminding one of the Ten Commandments engraved upon the tables of stone, even when they were only telling you that in their opinion it would rain tomorrow." 75 But the commandment--the negation of "it will be fine tomorrow"--seemingly enforced by "the arid scimitar of his father" (TL, 60), turns out to be only the law of the uniformity of nature to which the father too is subject, as powerless to alter as the mother. So also the war, a man-made phenomenon, is subject to laws that escape the law-making fathers who initiated it. They set in motion events without a concern for the future, as if the past could always be revoked or undone. The language of Woolf's account of Keynes's reaction to the Paris Peace Conference is marked by this sense of the partial determinism of events set in motion in time:
He is disillusioned he says. No more does he believe in the stability of the things he likes. Eton is doomed; the governing classes, perhaps Cambridge too. These conclusions were forced on him by the dismal & degrading spectacle of the Peace Congress . . . a fate seemed to possess the business from the first, driving it all in the most fatal direction & soon no one had the strength to resist. 76
"Beyond" the distant cloud is the world of universals: the "black blue . . . that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely" (BA, 22-3). The colorless "world of being," as Russell calls the world of universals, is the realm in which all weather is eternally in potentia (PP, 100). "Heaven was changeless" (BA, 174). From its store of possibilities some enter the actual time-series. In the continuous tidal expansion and retraction, the thinning and thickening--"Tick, tick, tick, went the machine in the bushes" (BA, 174)--is created the "gigantic pattern," "half remembered, half foreseen," its structure formed by cuts, creating units divided by intervals. 77
Time went on and on like the hands of the kitchen clock. (The machine chuffed in the bushes.) If they had met with no resistence, she mused, nothing wrong, they'd still be going round and round and round. The Home would have remained; and Papa's beard, she thought, would have grown and grown; and Mama's knitting--what did she do with all her knitting?--Change had to come, she said to herself, or there'd have been yards and yards of Papa's beard, of Mama's knitting. . . . change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time [BA, 174].
The cut is the rejection of duration; there is no change without it. Papa's beard and Mama's knitting, like Mrs. Ramsay's brown stocking, symbols of endless becoming, meet a Greek fate that gives them the form of physical time.
Tragedy is the literary expression of this view of time. The key text is the Apostle F. L. Lucas's Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1928. 78 Tragedy, according to Lucas, yields physics' god-like omniscience of past and future, "If the gods alone, as the adage says, can be spectators in the world, the spectators in the world of the theatre should be for the nonce as gods, knowing all or almost all," writes Lucas. 79 Looking on the drama's future as Mrs. Ramsay looks back over the threshold, the spectators see it menacing the blind protagonists. "It is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future," Russell insists (OK, 238); it is simply "that natural human weakness which is unable to foresee the future," Lucas echoes (TR, 97). "We might--as in the pretended visions of seers--see future events immediately in the way in which we see past events," Russell says. "They certainly will be what they will be, and are in this sense just as determined as the past" (OK, 238; also ML, 197).
The "tragic" dimension arises in the difference, supplied by the subjective element, between the A and B series, in what Whitehead calls "[t]he contrast between the comparative emptiness of Presentational Immediacy and the deep significance disclosed by Causal Efficacy," the dissociation of moment and series, which he pronounces in Aristotelian terms "at the root of the pathos which haunts the world": "'Pereunt et imputantur' is the inscription on old sundials in 'religious' houses: 'The hours perish and are laid to account.'  'Imputantur' refers to the world disclosed in its causal efficacy . . . with its own individuality." The one is the impressionist moment, "gay with a thousand tints"; the other the B series, "where each event infects the ages to come, for good or for evil." "Almost all pathos includes a reference to lapse of time," Whitehead concludes (S, 47). This is the contrast between the present and the inevitable sequence of moments constituting the uniformity of nature, between the characters caught in the moment, unable to see beyond it, and the fate that unfolds before our eyes. That fate, in Whitehead's words, is a "primitive experience," one "heavy with the contact of things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves," which gain "a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and for the fate towards which they go" (S, 43-4). For Whitehead, "[t]ragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought," the aesthetic response to the confirmation by the crucial experiment of scientific prediction--his example is an eclipse. 80
In what way is the contrast also between the contingent and the necessary? History is the realm of the contingent; what happens in it could always have been otherwise and hence is not necessary. Yet, once events occur, they cannot be reversed. Their historical character is that of "an irreversible temporal sequence," Franco Moretti writes. It "is dominated by the perception that there is no going back, which is epitomized in the act of dying." 81 This irreversibility is precisely that necessity Aristotle assigns to the past. Once events happen, they cannot be otherwise. The element of chance or contingency is the mark of their empirical reality; their irreversibility gives them their necessary order. Tragedy is more philosophical than history by making apparent the necessary dimension in the actualization of a contingent possibility. Tragedy, Victor Goldschmidt writes, represents facts or deeds "that seem due to chance and that nevertheless . . . appear to be produced by necessity." 82 Its language is the past. "The past is indeed the most tragic of the tenses," Lucas writes (we need only add that the tragic past is the nondeictic past). "If it was happy, it is no more; if it was disastrous, it cannot be undone" (TR, 80).
The series of sequentially adopted shifting points of view from which "[w]e can look backwards to past ages, or dimly divine the future" 83 provide the positions To the Lighthouse's characters occupy on the eve of "Time Passes": "'Well, we must wait for the future to show,' said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace. 'It's almost too dark to see,' said Andrew, coming up from the beach. 'One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land,' said Prue" (TL, 189). From within the moment, nothing beyond is visible, for the "enjoyment of immediate sense-data notoriously inhibits apprehension of the relevance of the future" (S, 42). "Tragic heroes are always conspicuously blind," Moretti writes (STW, 58). They are blind to the pattern that permits the outline of the future to be discovered in the past. But once "the lamps were all extinguished" and the subjects scrutinizing the night have shut their eyes in bed, the future, never directly apprehensible, becomes known, but only to the "eyeless." For the novel also recounts future events that unfold unbeknownst to those sleeping through the night of time, some of whom remain in the dark about the morrow. It contains the "series spread out and simultaneously viewable," in Geach's description, "successive approximations to the truth" (ML, 108) whose implacable logic reveals, with hindsight, from the tragic perspective, the future's inevitability--such is its narrative omniscience, one belonging to no one in the novel but rather shown by the text.
In this way, the novel for Woolf gives the tragic perspective on time seen from eternity, the one Augustus Carmichael, assuming the posture of "an old pagan god" adopts at To the Lighthouse's conclusion (TL, 309). In the tableau in which he and Lily Briscoe watch Mr. Ramsay's tiny boat reach the lighthouse, poet and artist become observers of a pageant, the "procession . . . past, present, future" (ND, 447-8) translated into the B series, of a destiny whose conclusion they can do nothing to alter. 84 In the novel, as in tragedy, "a terrible inevitability is gained by beginning, not at the very beginning, but just before the catastrophe, when the tragic mistakes have been made and are beyond God Himself to undo" (TR, 79). We recognize "the power to create the tense, overcharged atmosphere before the storm, to 'pile the dim outlines of the coming doom,' that forms no small part of the impressiveness of Aeschylus," according to Lucas (TR, 86). The backdrop of twilight, the fading of day, endows those caught in time with that "ethereal" quality that in "the failing light" the res on the lawn take (TL, 111). Within "this profound stillness" (TL, 158), there is no time: "no tears, no sense that this sunny day is perhaps the last," as Woolf says of a Vanessa Bell painting. 85 Part one of To the Lighthouse shows us the characters with no sense of the tragedy that "Time Passes" will contain, no certainty that it will rain, while from the retrospect of part three Mr. Ramsay sails to the lighthouse as to his destiny. (Even a dramatic unity of place is observed, as in Between the Acts; the novel's unity of time only revises the classical drama's rules requiring two days, with the space of a night between.) And, as Russell's statements about events are in the past, so the novel's statements are characteristically in the past. "'He has landed,' she [Lily] said aloud. 'It is finished'" (TL, 309). This consummatum est pronounced, like that at the end of "The Death of the Moth," Mr. Carmichael, "shading his eyes with his hand" (TL, 309), looks out to the sea over which the guns of August are earlier heard--"there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers" (TL, 200). He becomes one with the res of the mothers of the world, like Mrs. Pascoe "shading her eyes and looking out to sea" (JR, 53) or the "elderly woman" Mrs Dalloway's "solitary traveller" encounters, "coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing" and appearing "to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the re of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world" (MD, 87).
The encounter takes place in a "village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the res still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihilation" (MD, 87). Here Woolf "imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea" that she says furnishes the background of Greek tragedy and that, aside from the climate, "[is] to be found in the wilder parts of England" (CE, 1:1). The maternal re, whether Mrs. Ramsay or the grey nurse who "resumed her knitting" over Peter Walsh's nap that triggers the solitary traveler episode is a Greek Fate (MD, 85). "I see her knitting on the hall step while we play cricket," Woolf writes of her mother; "she seemed to watch, like some wise Fate, the birth, growth, flower and death of innumerable lives all round her" (MB, 84, 34). The vision Augustus Carmichael, whose name connects him to the "august fate," has and Lily Briscoe has had by the novel's end is that of "the spectators in the world of the theatre . . . as gods, knowing all or almost all"; it is that of Mrs. Ramsay "return[ing]" in memory to
that unreal but fascinating place, the Mannings' drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks [TL, 140].
Seen from eternity, the river of time crystallizes into a still series of such momentary pools, yielding the tragic vision. It is articulated in Augustus Carmichael's statement in the future perfect, "They will have landed," indicative that neither Lily nor he can see the landing but also that it is accomplished, achieving the perfection of the tragic past--"he was surveying, tolerantly and compassionately, their final destiny" (TL, 309). With the future perfect, the incompleteness of the novel's title is completed, the event already takes its place with the past in the theory of Cambridge changes: "The sights we see and the sounds we hear have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace" (CE, 4:164). Mr. Carmichael achieves such certainty, "surveying . . . their final destiny" as the novel closes, with "the trident (it was only a French novel)," with its series of preterites, "in his hand," by this substitution of the god's symbol, desacralizing their history, for what could be more secular than a French novel (TL, 309)?
"Instead of manipulating reality so as to conform to the libido," Fry says, the novels that have endured "note the inexorable sequence in life of cause and effect, they mark the total indifference of fate to all human desires, and they endeavor to derive precisely from that inexorability of fate an altogether different kind of pleasure--the pleasure which consists in the recognition of inevitable sequences." 86 As Tractatus 6.374 comments on 6.373, "Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world." Fry's enduring novels accomplish what we recognize as "the task of tragedy," which Russell says, in "The Study of Mathematics," is "[t]o reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of Fate--which is merely the literary personification" of "alien forces" (ML, 65). They capture the property of the "great torrent" of life--"its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards" that fills Katharine Hilbery "with at least a temporary exaltation" (ND, 439). "So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable," Wittgenstein writes, "as did the ancients at God and Fate." "And they both are right and wrong," he goes on. "But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained" (Tractatus 6.372). So Whitehead links the Greeks' "vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent," to "the vision possessed by science." 87
The stark stillness of a time with a relational, nondirectional, spatial geometry imparts to Woolf's novels their "almost Greek severity of form" (TR, 76). This "Greek" aesthetic underlies the Bloomsbury modernism that was worked out first in the visual arts under the name of "Post-Impressionism." It is not far-fetched to call the latter "Greek" as a particular case of the "Mediterranean." Quentin Bell writes that "Cézanne . . . signalled a new interest . . . in what [Duncan Grant] would have called 'Southern' art," which, according to Bell, is "tied to architecture." This connected it to geometry--Cézanne "assumed the existence of and still needs a cubic and rectilinear environment with vertical walls and horizontal floors." 88 Its geometry was inspired by what Russell called the "sharp outlines and definite separations such as the landscapes of Greece afford" that "[l]ike the philosophers of ancient Greece, I prefer." 89 Its was "the beauty of form," of "Mediterranean harmony" 90 like Mrs. Ramsay's beauty, "very clearly Greek, straight" (TL, 47). Impressionism, by contrast, was a "Northern" art, born of the atmospheric "muddle" of that climate--English "light," Fry claimed, "was full of vapour. Nothing was clear." 91 Northern art "grew up amidst coloured windows and darkened interiors," 92 Bell says, although Woolf's contrast between the Greek "out-of-doors manner" and the "introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors" makes the plein air school half a Southern one (CE, 1:2). Russell's mathematical world of being is Greek; his "fleeting, vague" world of existence, Northern (PP, 100). The point, for Russell as for Fry, was to combine the two schools. So, to imagine Sophocles in the English village, Woolf says that "we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills" (CE, 1:2). 93 We must substitute for English unpredictable weather the relentless sun of the South and become not just empirical but as "logical as the sun." 94 We could hear in Woolf an assent to Leslie Stephen's statement that "[t]he strong point of the English mind is its vigorous grasp of facts; its weakness is its comparative indifference to logical symmetry." 95 Her espousal of Fry's aesthetic aspired to a grander architecture than that enclosed by the house of "The Window," one containing both window and lighthouse with the vast and vaulted spaces of "Time Passes" in between, an architecture based, like the Parthenon, on "a network of strokes" or "a mathematical diagram" (JR, 169). Yet, if the geometry of the novel forms, like the "strokes" of Lily's painting, a temporal, "rhythmical movement," it is nonetheless struck into the static conration of time as space Bergson finds so objectionable (TL, 236). The "whole series of uncomplimentary epithets" by which, according to Russell, Bergson "condemns"--as "static, Platonic, mathematical, logical, intellectual" (HWP, 810)--the position Russell defends could thus be summarized as "Greek," understood as non-Heraclitian. Bergson's is "the revolt of the modern man of action against the authority of Greece, and more particularly of Plato," Russell writes (HWP, 792). 96 A formally static and nominally "timeless" universe--"the stable, the permanent" are Woolf's adjectives for the Greeks (CE, 1:4)--has the "mediterranean clarity"--the phrase is both Russell's and Forster's--Fry would find in Cézanne's Provençal geometry and Poussin's classicism. 97
A hasty assumption might pronounce acquiescence to time as fate a form of quietism, the refusal of engagement and action. Yet Russell, for one, never exempted himself from involvement in politics. The context in which he speaks of reconciliation to the "reign" of fate puts forward a more complex relation between acquiescence and action. "The contemplation of what is non-human," Russell writes,
the discovery that our minds are capable of dealing with material not created by them, above all, the realisation that beauty belongs to the outer world as to the inner, are the chief means of overcoming the terrible sense of impotence, of weakness, of exile amid hostile powers, which is too apt to result from acknowledging the all-but omnipotence of alien forces [ML, 65].
It is the "task of tragedy," Russell says, "[t]o reconcile us" to the all-but-omnipotence of this "reign of Fate." Tragedy thus becomes the literary expression of the study of mathematics, the intellectual pursuit that permits Russell to find the point where the universal quantifier ceases to apply to the power we confront. The question of freedom is raised from the very perspective of necessity. For, Russell goes on,
mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied and our best hopes not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound importance of its beauty [ML, 65].
Mathematics yields not only the vision in which future becomes past. In revealing the limits imposed by the world of universals, it also defines the realm of possibility that allows the future to be affected by the past. Russell, it is worth recalling, was in prison for "statements likely to prejudice the recruiting and discipline of His Majesty's forces" 98 during the war when he wrote that "Pure logic, and pure mathematics . . . aims at being true, in Leibnizian phraseology, in all possible worlds, not only in this higgledy-piggledy job-lot of a world in which chance has imprisoned us" and invoked "a certain lordliness which the logician should preserve." 99 Circumstances had forced upon him a position outside the struggle in which he had been engaged and from which he could see at once the course of events and the limited extent of his power to stop them.
Freedom lies in this position's dualism, what Russell describes as "the independence" of ourselves and the world of mathematics. "Not only is mathematics independent of us and our thoughts, but in another sense we and the whole universe of existing things are independent of mathematics" (ML, 65). Dualism also means the incessant return to "daily life" from this position outside time (ML, 18). This is the character of Bloomsbury's modernity. Woolf had always given a special, positive value to the term "modern"--unlike T. S. Eliot, for instance. Our exposition shows that modernity for Woolf was the "correlation" of the present moment--contemporaneity--and a vision of history in which all time is ultimately past. The dualism inherent in it defines a critical difference between Bergsonian futurism and Russell's Greek time. For Bergson's dualism is the prelude to the rejection of one side.  He rejects it, thinking "time ought not to enter into our theoretical philosophical thought," whereas the idea of "progress . . . admits the difference between earlier and later into the very citadel of its contemplative outlook." "[T]o see the world truly" one must "overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future." "Something of Hellenism . . . must be combined with its [Bergsonism's] hurrying Western self-assertion" (ML, 21, emphasis in original). The distance from one side to the other of the dualism creates the position from which the actual moment we occupy can be criticized. The "lordly" position Russell counseled could thus be seen as the logical conclusion of the politics that had propelled him to oppose the war; rather than plunge headlong into its prosecution, as had Whitehead, who was influenced by Bergson and Gilbert Murray, his opposition to it required a critical distance. The god-like perspective from which all events appear as past is one that crucially permits this distance from the realm of action, one that makes it possible to seize what might be its consequences. "A reciprocal liberty must thus be accorded: reason cannot dictate to the world of facts, but the facts cannot restrict reason's privilege of dealing with whatever objects its love of beauty may cause to seem worthy of consideration" (ML, 66).
The Cambridge theory of time takes its place in a larger history of time-thinking. Russell's "idealist apprenticeship" connects this thinking, perhaps surprisingly, with Hegelianism, while at the same time separating itself quite explicitly from the latter. It was Hegelian in that it conceived of history in terms of breaks; it was a revolutionary theory of history, in that sense. Hegelian time-thinking's aesthetic also accords a privileged status to tragedy. Its conception of tragedy has its origins with the Greeks, but it has been altered to make it the expression of modernity. The pre-Bergsonian György Lukács's 1910 essay "The Metaphysics of Tragedy" shows the elements of the time theory that shape Woolf's novels. "A drama is a play about man and his fate," Lukács begins his essay, "a play in which God is the spectator." 100 In the modern tragic world, "God must leave the stage, but must yet remain a spectator" ("MT," 154). The Greek ideas of "fate" and "destiny" are refashioned to permit another concept of human essence than the one that currently res in the term "essentialism," an essence that requires time, for a destiny can only "unfold" ("MT," 164). It is a revolutionary time, when, as Lukács says, "everything changes in a flash, everything suddenly becomes essential when the fateful word is spoken at last," "when enigmatic forces have distilled the essence from a man, have forced him to become essential," "his essential, true nature becoming more and more manifest" ("MT," 159, 155). It is "at the point" where "the miracle of accident has raised a man and his life," Lukács writes, that "tragedy begins" ("MT," 155). What it raises him to is the realm of necessity. In thus passing from the "now" to the irrevocable series, tragedy "incorporate[s] accident into its world forever" ("MT," 155). The flash, the unforeseen change, hardens into what can never be otherwise. "This sense of necessity is not the result of the inescapable workings of causality," however ("MT," 157). It is omnitemporal necessity, governed by the law of the uniformity of nature: "Tragic drama has to express the becoming-timeless of time" ("MT," 158).
Lucien Goldmann's Lukács-inspired notion of "the tragic vision" in his study of Jansenism and its perhaps surprising linkage of Pascal and Racine to Hegel, Marx, Lukács--"all tragic and dialectical authors"--demonstrates that "quietism," the withdrawal from the world of action, can at certain moments in history be a revolutionary act. 101 The appearance of Goldmann's book in 1955 as one of the early signs of the "new criticism" in France can be linked not just to Barthes's book on Racine. 102 Goldmann's "tragic vision" is not limited by him to the classical tragedy. So, when Barthes in Writing Degree Zero says of the situation of the bourgeois writer post-June, 1848, "Thus is born a tragic predicament peculiar to Literature," the word "tragic" betrays a wider debate (WDZ, 60). Here it refers most particularly if not exclusively to the novel--earlier Barthes had predicated the word "tragic" on the novel's style, which he defines partly in terms of the preterite, i.e. the historical past tense, which he labels "one of the most obsessive signs of this tragic aspect of writing which was born in the last century" (WDZ, 38). It is a "fateful gesture" (WDZ, 40). In the writing of history and of the novel, which share this tense, "the preterite is the very act by which society affirms its possession of its past and its possibility," part of a style adopted "in proportion as existence becomes fate" (WDZ, 33, 36). Finally, Flaubert's sense that "the bourgeois state is an incurable ill which sticks to the writer" Barthes finds "the essence of tragic feeling" (WDZ, 64). In the literary history he traces, "the purest" among writers "return" to the "'Flaubertization' of writing" "as to an acknowledgement of their fate" (WDZ, 66). As a response to Sartre's voluntarism, Barthes finds a "necessity" in writing as well as a "freedom" (WDZ, 87). Writing must acknowledge and acquiesce before what is the case, in the process discovering what Lukács calls "the historical possibility of tragic epochs" ("MT," 154).
The thesis implicit in these pronouncements is that the modernist novel inaugurated by Flaubert is structured by the "tragic vision" in its very language. Now this thesis has an alternative, the one set forth by Franco Moretti in Signs Taken for Wonders. Moretti inherits the very tradition Barthes does; they only differ on the novel's inclusion in it, which could be a factor in Moretti's making Ulysses the paradigmatic modern novel. Without denying it that role, one could observe of it what Katherine Mansfield said of Woolf's Night and Day, that for it "'The war never has been.'" Perhaps the explanation lies with Joyce's Irish nationality and with his having spent the greater part of the war in neutral Switzerland. What Moretti writes of Lukács--that "between 1910 and 1920" "[f]orm coagulates into a cruel a priori--extreme, tragic, opposed to life"--could also be said of To the Lighthouse (STW, 11, 12). The opposition between life and form worked out in Lily Briscoe's painting is a response then to a succession of events a generation was powerless to prevent and even more powerless to reverse.
If an important strain of British modernism saw the consequences of the Great War with something like the vision of Greek tragedy, it was not just to reconcile itself to these consequences. It was also to understand the future via this terrible past. The strikingly similar role of prognostications about the morrow's weather in both To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, one a postwar retrospective, the other written on the eve of another war, yet both written in the past tense, reveals the significance of the refusal to admit "the difference between earlier and later." Yet the future is placed differently in the two novels. The war divides past and future in the first. The future the matchmaking Mrs. Ramsay attempts to predict and affect does not turn out as planned: the marriage she makes ends in divorce in the postwar world. She does not foresee her own nor her children's deaths. But she in some sense divines even those unforeseen events, achieving the calm acceptance of what "will be" as if it had already achieved the perfection of the past expressed by Augustus Carmichael's future perfect. But Between the Acts ends with the characters in the position of those on the eve of "Time Passes," confronting the war that was one of the "consequences of the peace" Keynes had foreseen, gazing once more out the window at what "was too dark to see" (BS, 214), going over the past to discern the future, recording that day's "weather, which was perfect, save for one shower" and recalling "'last year it rained.'" "'This year, last year, next year, never . . .'" Ida repeats (BA, 214, 217). The novel ends with a sequence of statements in the historical past, e.g., "The paper crackled. The second hand jerked on. M. Daladier had pegged down the franc. . . . The clock ticked" (BA, 216-7). Meanwhile, "[t]he darkness increased" as Mrs. Swithin reads her Outline of History: "'England,' she was reading, 'was then a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. . . .'" Once again, the window gives on time passing. But "[t]he great square of the open window showed only sky now. It was drained of light, stone cold. Shadows fell" (BA, 218). The future in the fading light, just before the curtain on the last act is raised, has become indistinguishable in its darkness from the unobserved past: "It was night before roads were made, or houses" (BA, 219). Nonetheless, against its uncertainty the novel moves to seize the relentless pageant of English history precisely in order not to give in to the feeling of impotence.
Here the contrast with the Futurist and Vorticist celebration of a blind thrust forward could not be greater. There is much yet to be said about the difference between the historical thinking we are qualifying as tragic and Bergsonism, so often connected to modernism and also taken over by various fascist ideologies. 103 But one thing is clear. Conceiving of time as a series of fixed events operating with a kind of fateful necessity, determining which future events are possible and which are impossible, is in no way incompatible with the attempt to change their course. Lukács's "gods of reality, of history," flattened to the force of events, "want not only to be the spectators of the fulfillment of revelation, but also to direct and accomplish that fulfillment. Their hands tug wilfully at the enigmatic yet obvious tangle of the threads of fate" ("MT," 154). For the sequence of events is marked by "something dangerous": "the great moment, the miracle," as Woolf puts it, the chance permitting its direction not to be reversed but to be altered. That cannot be accomplished by moving with the times in a celebration of progress--what is ultimately more acquiescent than that? It cannot be accomplished by erecting the meaningless, bare sequence into a story, a fiction--"we may again hope for the coming of tragedy," Lukács writes, only "once all the dancing shadows of a friendly order, which our cowardly dreams have cast upon nature to allow us a false sense of security, have entirely disappeared" ("MT," 154). It is precisely one of those accidents of history in which tragedy erupts--the "intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions" of the "ashen-coloured ship"--that in "Time Passes" made it impossible "to continue . . . to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within" (TL, 201). Instead, "the mirror was broken"; the illusion was shattered. In the interval, Mr. Carmichael brought out his volume of war poetry.
Ann Banfield has been teaching linguistics and literature in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1975. She is the author of Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, and The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
1. See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
2. J. M. Keynes, "Time," paper in the Modern Archive Centre of King's College, Cambridge.
3. Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 1861-1910 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1:132.
4. The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, cited in G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 14. See Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 132, on McTaggart. Nicholas Griffin, Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 44, quotes Russell's statement "that McTaggart had killed time 'in this month's "Mind"'."
5. See J. M. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); hereafter abbreviated NE.
6. The subject of Broad's book, Russell said as some indication of the popularity of the subject, "is Space, Time, and Matter. This, however, is the title of Weyl's book; and when I once asked a bookseller for Weyl's book he offered me first Space, Time and Gravitation, and then Space, Time and Deity. So it is no longer open to an author to call a book 'Space, Time, and so-and-so'" (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985-92], 9:260; hereafter abbreviated CPBR). See also Broad's entry under "Time" in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Scribner, 1928), 334-45. Nicod's book is his 1923 thèse du doctorat, for which Russell wrote the preface.
7. See CPBR 9:308, 53.
8. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), 29.
9. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1919), 270; hereafter abbreviated ND.
10. C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company, 1923), 84; hereafter abbreviated ST.
11. Donald C. Williams, "The Sea t Tomorrow," in Structure, Meaning and Method, ed. Paul Henle, et al. (New York: Liberal Arts, 1951), 282; hereafter abbreviated "SFT."
12. W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 119.
13. Jaakko Hintikka, Time and Necessity: Studies in Aristotle's Theory of Modality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 148-9; hereafter abbreviated TN.
14. There has been a considerable literature on this debate since World War II, beginning with Donald Williams, but I have found no references in English to it in the period we are considering. Jules Vuillemin, discussing interpretations of Diodorus, writes that Russell adopts one "[i]ndépendamment de toute référence historique" (Nécessité ou contingence: L' Aporie de Diodore et les systèmes philosophiques [Paris: Minuit, 1984], 69, n. 9). A. N. Prior's introductory chapter of Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 1-19, begins with McTaggart's argument and ends with Aristotle and Diodorus without making an explicit connection. But Bergson's address to the "Congrès d'Oxford" on "La prévision et la nouveauté" in 1921 makes clear the problem was being debated; see Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1322-6. At an earlier conference at Oxford in 1911, Bergson discussed "La Perception du changement," with references to Zeno; see Mélanges, 1375-92.
15. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932-35, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 5:91.
16. Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 4 February 1913, quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 523.
17. Bertrand Russell to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 13 February 1913, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, The Early Years: 1872-World War I (London: Little Brown and Company, 1967), 298.
18. Lytton Strachey, quoted in Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 523.
19. See Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 98-9. Stephen also wrote the entry on Hobbes in The Dictionary of National Biography.
20. D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3; hereafter abbreviated RT. F. H. Bradley also holds that "Time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but to be a contradictory appearance" (Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay [1893; London: Oxford University Press, 1969], 36).
21. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Bergson, with a reply by Mr. H. Wildon Carr, Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, and a rejoinder by Mr. Russell (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1914), 340; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1946; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 805; hereafter abbreviated HWP.
22. G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, 1922), 136; hereafter abbreviated PS.
23. Bertrand Russell, "On the Experience of Time," Monist 25 (April, 1915): 212.
24. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912; London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 34; hereafter abbreviated PP, Russell speaks of the "correspondence" of "the relations of physical objects" with "the relations of sense data." Later he uses the term "correlation" both for "the transition from perception to physics" (The Analysis of Matter [1927; New York: Dover, 1954], 333). See also Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1917; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 132; hereafter abbreviated ML. In lecture IV of Our Knowledge of the External World, Russell talks of "[t]he correlation of different private times" and of the private being "correlated" with the physical, both in time and space.
25. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 241; hereafter abbreviated TL.
26. Russell, "On the Experience of Time," 213, emphasis in original.
27. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928), 329.
28. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957), 99.
29. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1914), 122; hereafter abbreviated OK.
30. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Shulkind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 75; hereafter abbreviated MB.
31. Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, "Introduction," The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2. For the distinction between tensed and tenseless, see RT, chapter 1.
32. For the distinction between "acquaintance" or direct, unmediated knowledge and "knowledge by description," see Bertrand Russell, "On Denoting," in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 255; hereafter abbreviated LK; see also PP, chapter 5; ML, 202-24; and LK, 127-74.
33. Peter Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 90. For Geach "Cambridge change" was "the common property of the Cambridge philosophers at that time," Russell's Principles furnishing his example (90-1).
34. This is why many philosophers, Russell included, have pointed out that "cogito" or "je pense" is incorrectly translated by "I think" and correctly by "I am thinking"; it cannot be a universal statement.
35. G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953; New York: Collier Books, 1962), 319, emphasis in original.
36. Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript, in CPBR, ed. Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, in collaboration with Kenneth Blackwell (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 7:42.
37. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 102.
38. "I believe Hebrew and Chinese are preferable in this respect, but unfortunately I was never taught either," Russell adds (TK, 107). Broad's "iterated conviction that time is not very analogous to space," Williams says, "results mostly from the spell of Indo-European language, which bristles with time-distinctions" ("SFT," 299).
39. Williams makes an argument similar to ours for the "historical present," which occurs with fixed time adverbials, when he comments, "This, perhaps, is what the vulgar see as in a glass darkly when they talk in the 'historical present tense': 'So this guy, see, hangs one on his jaw, and he goes out like a light'" ("SFT," 286).
40. The significance of the novel's unspoken narrative past has not been fully appreciated; Hintikka connects Aristotle's time thinking to how "Greek culture" is "largely based on the spoken and not on the written word" (TN, 88).
41. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 32; hereafter abbreviated WDZ.
42. The claim is made by Emile Benveniste. His arguments about the French aorist in Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), require a revision of Hans Reichenbach's familiar schema, since the aorist would be a tense without the "point of speech," the time-point of the "token-reflexive" or deictic (Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy [New York: The Free Press, 1947], 288); see also my Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 141-80, 257-74.
43. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931), 21.
44. The verbs in the passé simple are "souffla sa bougie"; "étendit les bras . . . ils restèrent vides"; "se maria"; "Prue Ramsay mourut l'été suivant"; "Un obus fit explosion. Vingt ou trente jeunes gens furent tués . . . la mort, Dieu merci, fut instantanée"; "publia . . . un volume de poésies qui eut un succes inattendu"; "Lily Briscoe fit apporter sa valise. . . . Mr. Carmichaël arriva par le même train" (Woolf, La Promenade au phare, trans. M. LaNoire [Paris: Stock, n.d.], 173, 175, 179, 180, 182, 183, 192, my emphasis).
45. Virginia Woolf, "Le Temps passe," trans. Charles Mauron, in Commerce: Cahiers trimestriels publiés par les soins de Paul Valéry, Léo-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud 10 (winter 1926): 91.
46. G. E. Moore, "The Nature of Judgment," in The Early Essays, ed. Tom Regan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 72.
47. Griffin, Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship, 44, claims, however, that "despite Russell's excitement over McTaggart's arguments . . . there was a persistent tendency" even for the early idealist Russell "to place as little reliance on the unreality of time as possible."
48. "The law makes no difference between past and future" (Bertrand Russell, "On the Notion of a Cause," in ML, 189, cf. 195-6). For an earlier treatment of causality, see idem, Principles of Mathematics, 448, 474-79. See also idem, The ABC of Relativity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 215.
49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922).
50. The "principle of induction" is presented in Keynes's thesis A Treatise on Probability (1921; London: Macmillan and Company, 1948), 52. He was still working on the thesis when he shared a house with Woolf in 1911. For a discussion of the changes in Keynes's later thinking on induction, see John B. Davis, Keynes's Philosophical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 142 ff.
51. See Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969); hereafter abbreviated BA.
52. See Henry Le Roy Finch, Wittgenstein--The Early Philosophy: An Exposition of the Tractatus (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 154. See also Elizabeth Anscombe's comments on 5.1362 where she finds that "Wittgenstein agrees with Aristotle about this problem." But if this is because "in Wittgenstein, and in Aristotle: past and present facts are necessary," then he agrees also with Russell. ("Aristotle and the Sea Battle: De Interpretatione Chapter IX," Mind 65, no. 257 [1956]: 14-15.)
53. Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 153, 161.
54. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 454.
55. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 2:293; hereafter abbreviated CE.
56. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (1922; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), 49; hereafter abbreviated JR.
57. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1927; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), 4-5; hereafter abbreviated MD.
58. Here Woolf almost suggests that anarchist theme in which time, as the alarm clock, is a bomb that Andrej Biely made such use of in Petersburg.
59. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Putnam, 1927), 46; hereafter abbreviated S.
60. Henri Bergson, "La Perception du Changement," talk given at Oxford in May, 1911, in Henri Bergson: Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1392.
61. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 102
62. Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality, 101; Geach rejects the spatial analogy for time.
63. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893; London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 189, emphasis in original.
64. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 356.
65. See PS, 136; Erwin R. Steinberg, "G. E. Moore's Table and Chair in To the Lighthouse," Journal of Modern Literature 14 (summer, 1988): 164, connects Moore's example to To the Lighthouse.
66. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy, 292.
67. Kneale and Kneale, Development of Logic, 128, 133.
68. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica to *56 (1910; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 7.
69. There is surely an unedited error here (Woolf never completed the text); "the next," with an obvious temporal reading, requires a parallel temporal adverbial in the first adjective phrase, e.g., "green one moment."
70. Russell, The Analysis of Matter, 386-7.
71. Katherine Mansfield, review of Night and Day, by Virginia Woolf, Athenaeum: A Journal of Politics, Literature, Science and the Arts, 21 November 1919, 1227.
72. Katherine Mansfield to Middleton Murry, 10 and 13 November 1919, The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Middleton Murry (London: Constable and Company, 1928), 1:279, 284; quoted in Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 2:69.
73. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920; New York: Penguin, 1988), 10; hereafter abbreviated EC.
74. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2:106.
75. Leonard Woolf, Sowing, 184.
76. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 1:288.
77. Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1937), 369.
78. Lucas was introduced to Woolf by Keynes. She pronounced Lucas's book "Academic." (Diary of Virginia Woolf, 3:150); but see also the section on "The Value of Tragedy" in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Vol. II: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937 (New York: Penguin Press, 1992), 64-6, for Keynes's response to Lucas on tragedy. In 1928 Keynes would write to him "regarding the often tragic nature of everyday life" (Davis, Keynes's Philosophical Development, 90).
79. F. L. Lucas, Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 90; hereafter abbreviated TR.
80. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Mentor Books, 1948), 17.
81. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 59, emphasis in original; hereafter abbreviated STW.
82. My translation. Victor Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote: Commentaire sur le quatrième livre de la Physique (10-14) et sur la Poétique (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 265. Goldschmidt discusses the connection between Aristotle's conception of time and his theory of tragedy.
83. Leslie Stephens, "What Is Materialism?" in An Agnostic's Apology and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1893), 166.
84. The scene demonstrates Proust's "power of being present suddenly at our own absence" (faculté d'assister brusquement à notre propre absence) by being reduced only to "the witness, the observer" (le témoin, l'observateur) (Clive Bell quotes the passage in his Proust [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929], 76).
85. S. P. Rosenbaum, ed. The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary, and Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 172.
86. Roger Fry, The Artist and Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 12.
87. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 17.
88. Quentin Bell, "Foreword" to Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vii.
89. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin Limited, 1956), 40.
90. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952), 313-14.
91. Roger Fry, quoted in Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 164.
92. Bell, "Foreword," vii.
93. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 15, conceives of Greek theatre similarly in terms of its relation to a stark landscape with its intensity of sunlight.
94. Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 104.
95. Leslie Stephens, A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1876), 34.
96. Thus, if the "classicism" of Fry's and Woolf's modernism has something of T. E. Hulme's--see, for instance, his reference to the Post-Impressionists in "Romanticism and Classicism," in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), 125--the difference is Hulme's Bergsonism. Moreover, Hulme's classicism is a rejection of "romanticism," whereas Bloomsbury classicism structures its impressionism.
97. Russell, Portraits from Memory, 39; Forster, A Passage to India, 295-6.
98. Quoted by A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell (New York: Viking, 1972), 13. Mark Sainsbury, Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 6, states that Russell's six-month imprisonment in 1918 was actually "for having written that the US Army was accustomed to intimidating strikers."
99. Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 192.
100. György Lukács, "The Metaphysics of Tragedy," in Soul and Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 152; hereafter abbreviated "MT."
101. My translation. Lucien Goldman, Le Dieu caché: Étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théatre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 160.
102. See Jean Alter, "Racine and the French New Criticism," A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 387.
103. See, for instance, Zeev Steernhell on Georges Sorel: "Reflecting Bergson's question 'whether the time had not come to abandon the old Greek method created for geometrical purposes in order to attempt to find reality, motivation, and content,' Sorel declared 'that knowledge obtained through concepts . . . is as ill-adapted to social facts as could be'" (The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, trans. David Maisel [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994], 56).
Even among critics exploring the political stakes of Anglo-American literary modernism--or, more narrowly, of Virginia Woolf's literary production--Woolf's 1931 novel, The Waves, has been read persistently as a highly aesthetic (and therefore apolitical) experiment in the representation of consciousness. 1 The much commented upon experimental nature of the text is, of course, evident from its opening pages: the disembodied narrative voice of the first italicized interlude, with its abstract and highly ral description of an unlocatable landscape, gives way in the first chapter to the cacophony of the personalized yet significantly indistinguishable voices that emanate from within the unstable circumferences of individual characters--or, perhaps more accurately, are attached to proper names that designate different but overlapping spaces of enunciation. Yet even as we immediately are confronted by the formal properties that arguably constitute the apogee of Woolf's narrative innovation, the opening interlude introduces a ral trajectory that draws us beyond the purview of the aesthetic, narrowly conceived. Describing a seascape at dawn, Wolff posits an original state of relative undifferentiation, in which "the sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles on it." 2 The sun rises and sunders this undifferentiated state; "the air," we are told, "seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire" (W, 3; my emphasis). This state of fibrous differentiation is, however, only momentary, for we immediately read that "gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence." This unity is itself quickly qualified by the statement that this incandescence "lifted the weight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue" (W, 3). The opening interlude thus frames the novel by drawing our attention to a conceptual movement from undifferentiation to individualization to a renewed form of wholeness or collectivity that is understood as a state of fusion that paradoxically maintains or supports a constellation of discrete atoms.
It is, broadly speaking, this trajectory that Michael Tratner takes up in the chapter of Modernism and Mass Politics devoted to The Waves. Arguing the need to resituate British literary high modernism in the context of a variety of collectivist projects that were widely influential in the early part of the twentieth century, Tratner understands the text as an exploration of a politically Left collectivism. 3 Tratner turns primarily to the group psychology of Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and William McDougall as the historical frame within which to approach the tension between individualism and collectivism in Woolf's text. I, however, shall contend that the text identifies a different terrain upon which to explore structures of collectivity. Though Woolf is undeniably interested in questions of psychology, I shall argue that she elaborates her understanding of collectivity or community not preeminently in terms of the mind, whether of the group or the individual, but rather that she turns instead to the bodily categories provided by neuroscientific discourse. 4 To that end, it will be crucial to interrogate the text's preoccupation with what it describes as "the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre" of the human nervous system and to explore the various registers in which this re functions (W, 178). As we have noted, the text's opening page inaugurates this re in a nonphysiological mode through the repeated description of the process of differentiation as one of increasing fibrosis. I will pursue the trajectory suggested by this initial interlude in arguing that the text quickly redeploys this naturalistic metaphor and takes a different sort of fibre, that constituting the human nervous system, as the context within which to explore a movement from differentiation to fusion, from individualization to the fashioning of collectivity.
This situation of the human body as the term around which forces of individualization and structures of collectivity circulate constitutes three problematics--historical, literary critical, and theoretical. In an historical frame, attention to the relationship between Woolf's text and neuroscientific discourse provides a means of exploring the interanimation of literary modernism and other, contemporaneous forms of cultural production. Without discounting the linguistic and formal experimentation that is a defining characteristic of modernist literature, and of which The Waves is a key example, my analytic approach draws attention to both literary and medical/scientific language's particular material history. Given that language simultaneously operates in different cultural domains whose borders are relatively permeable, attention to specific signifying clusters (in this case, those associated with the fibres of the human nervous system) will allow me to examine the processes through which communitarian cultural formations are produced in the interactions of discursive domains of literature and medical science. 5 To the extent that instances of linguistic contamination or cultural proximity are insufficient to establish relations of strict and unidirectional historical causality, my approach seeks neither to identify a determining historical context for Woolf's literary corpus nor to adduce its sociological or historical conditions of possibility or intelligibility. This is not to say, however, that I seek simply to demonstrate the radically transformative effects of her literary practice upon other forms of cultural practice. Rather, I will approach the transactions marked by the traces of linguistic contamination as indicating a space in which different cultural regimes come into contact in a variety of ways. This attention to what I have called the material history of Woolf's language provides a means of addressing the sociohistorical relations in which her language is embedded and of grasping those relations as more than a narrowly determining set of conditions.
Interrogating Woolf's nervous tropology in relation to contemporaneous neuroscience extends and complicates, in literary critical terms, the sort of historicist analysis practised, for example, by Tratner. Whereas his reading convincingly draws out thematic continuities between the novel and the work of various theorists of collectivity, including Harold Laski, Leonard Woolf, and R. H. Tawney, attention to the text's engagement of neuroscience makes The Waves legible as more than a literary presentation of social problems that simultaneously find articulation in other modes of intellectual work. Gillian Beer has argued that Woolf "was fascinated by communities" and that "the deep value which she accords to communality . . . has to do with her practice of writing out of the mass and out of the body." 6 My contention is that by conceiving of community through the bodily categories of neuroscience, Woolf theorizes not only possible forms of collectivity but also the mechanisms through which communitarian projects of the early twentieth century literally incorporate themselves. The body becomes, in this context, more than merely a re either for society or for those affective elements of experience that are markers of the intensely individual. In addition to its resonance in these ral registers, the body must be considered rather more literally, as it is constituted as the object of inquiry by a variety of increasingly prestigious bioscientific disciplines. By raising the question of the social body in this way, Woolf's text insists that we approach bioscience as a particularly powerful means of accessing and comprehending the individual bodies that communitarian projects inevitably seek to grasp as their objects. To the extent that The Waves asks us to consider how historically extant structures of collectivity are incorporated in their bioscientific grasp of individual bodies, it simultaneously demands that we theorize the communitarian implications of a body that resolutely refuses to be assimilated by the language and procedures of bioscience. In exploring this affective body, a body that opens up and exposes the interiorized, subjective space of the neuroscientific body, I attempt to re-mark the limit at which an ethical, communitarian impulse announces itself.
If the opening interlude of The Waves frames the text's overarching trajectory when it describes a movement from brute undifferentiation to individualization to a renewed state of indifference in fusion, the opening chapter takes up the first phase of that movement in a psychological register. Commencing with a series of short declarative sentences conveying basic sense-data--"I see a ring," "I see a slab of yellow," "I hear a sound" (W, 5)--the text introduces the characters as young children whose phenomenological existence initially is limited to rudimentary sense perception. Still within the confines of its first page, the chapter quickly represents a move from sensation to cognition, and the short declarations are supplanted by comparisons: "The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears," Susan tells us, and Louis chimes in with the observation that "A shadow falls on the path . . . like an elbow bent" (W, 5). This progressive differentiation of perceptual objects leads in turn to some measure of differential identification on the part of the speaking subjects themselves, and by the third page Louis defines himself in relation to the presence or absence of others, suddenly realizing that, "Now they have all gone . . . I am alone" (W, 7). The text's opening pages, in short, present an extremely compressed developmental schema that takes the characters from a stage of barely developed perceptual consciousness to a level of significant cognitive ability and individualization. If the language of the first chapter mimetically parades the characters through a process of psychological development, the chapter concludes with a scene so crucial that it will have been revisited four times by the end of the novel. This scene thematizes the inevitable procession towards individuality and recounts the moment at which the characters "troop upstairs like ponies . . . stamping, clattering one behind another to take [their] turns in the bathroom" where Mrs. Constable awaits, "girt in a bath-towel" and brandishing her water-soaked, "lemon-coloured sponge" (W, 19). Submitted in his turn to this embodiment of the Law, Bernard tells us that, "holding [the sponge] high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes it. Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh" (W, 19). In interesting contrast to post-Freudian models, Woolf understands the processes leading to individualization not primarily in visual or linguistic terms but in terms of the physiological mechanisms that produce the "bright arrows of sensation." Her interrogation of individualism, that is, takes place in close proximity to the corporeal model articulated by turn-of-the-century neuroscience.
To indicate briefly the salient features of this model, I refer primarily to the widespread reductionist impulse evident in the psychology of the period. Technological developments that allowed the bioscientist to decompose the body into ever more minute constituent components and to establish the chemical and mechanical relations between these components frequently resulted in the assumption that questions of the mind could be answered through appropriately scientific attention to the body. Programmatically encapsulating this orthodoxy, for example, Henry Maudsley's Body and Mind demands, "Surely it is time, we put seriously to ourselves the question whether the inductive method, which has proved its worth by its abundant fruitfulness wherever it has been faithfully applied, should not be as rigidly used in the investigation of mind as in the investigation of other natural phenomena." Indeed, shifting from the interrogative to the declarative, he asserts that "To begin the study of mind with the observation of its humblest bodily manifestations is a strictly scientific method." 7 This drive to apply the principles of physical science to the psychological realm is manifest, moreover, in the work of res as diverse and influential as Sigmund Freud and William James. Freud opens his prepsychoanalytic Project for a Scientific Psychology with the avowal that it is his "intention to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles," 8 and James introduces The Principles of Psychology with the dual claims that "a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology," and that the "psychologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist." 9
The model of the nervous system made available by neurology and neurophysiology is that of a series of relays conducting impulses from the bodily periphery to the center and then to the periphery again, with the central nervous system functioning as a switching station between sensation and motivity. Afferent nerves are understood to carry sensory excitation to the central nervous system, which then discharges the quantum of nervous energy to the periphery in the form of motor activity. Most contentious in this schema was the role of the central nervous system in determining by which path, among a multitude of possibilities, any given nervous impulse would be discharged. Suspicious of appeals to volitional categories in the explanation of this decision-making process, and in many cases attempting to account for supposed acts of will in physiological terms, neuroscientific models turned instead to the physical characteristics of the nervous system. Fairly representative in this respect is James's description of the "plasticity" of nerve tissue and the notion of habit that becomes its predicate:
Plasticity means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed [PP, 110, emphasis in original].
Insisting that "the philosophy of habit is . . . in the first instance, a chapter in physics," and that habit is "at bottom a physical principle," James suggests that the nervous system is physically altered by the nervous energy it transmits (PP, 110). Once a given type of afferent impulse is discharged via a specific motor pathway, the system is altered such that subsequent impulses of that type will be more likely to be discharged in the same way. Repeated patterns of transmission and discharge literally "leave organic impression[s]" on the fibres of the nervous system, and James goes so far as to suggest that, "it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain" (PP, 116, 130, emphasis in original). Beyond emphasizing the deterministic implications of this model, according to which patterns of behavior are physically scored into the nervous system, it is worth noting that James is also fairly representative in the conclusions to which his psycho-physiological model leads.  "The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells," he warns, "is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar" (PP, 130-1). Habit is, for James,
the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and frozen zone. It dooms us all to t out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing [PP, 125].