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nt and Time
Event and Titne
Series Board

James Bernauer

Drucilla Cornell

Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart

Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion
Adriaan Peperzak

Thomas Sheehan

Hent de Vries

Merold Westphal

Michael Zimmerman
John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN
CONTINENTAL
PHILOSOPHY
Blank page
 CLAUDE ROMANO

Event and Time

TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN E. LEWIS

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York • 2014
Copyright© 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photo-
copy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without
the prior permission of the publisher.

Event and Time was first published in French under the title L'evenement et le temps by
Presses Universitaires de France, © 1999 Presses Universitaires de France. It was
reissued in 2012 with corrections and a new Preface by the author. The present English
translation is based on the reissue, along with further additions from the author.

Cet ouvrage, pub lie clans le cadre du programme d' aide ala publication, beneficie du
soutien du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres et du Service Culture! de l'Ambassade de
France represente aux Etats-Unis.

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing
assistance program.

Cet ouvrage a beneficie du soutien des Programmes d'aide ala publication de l'Institut
Franc;ais.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from
the Institut Franc;ais.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats.
Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 5432 1

First edition
 -For Martin

ai cruµcpopa1 TWV av8pwrrwv axoucr1 KCTl

OUKl wv8pwrro1 TWV cruµcpop£wv.
-Herodotus, Histories

"Ich" "Subjekt" als Horizont-Linie.

Umkehrung des perspektivischen Blicks.
-Nietzsche,
Nachlasse, 1885-1886
Blank page
Contents

Preface to the Second French Edition xi

Translator's Note xvii

Introduction 1

PART 1. THE METAPHYSICS OF TIME 9

§1. The Traditional Determinations of Time and Their Structural Dependence
with Respect to the Phenomenon of Inner-Temporality 9 • §2. The Paradoxes
of the Parmenides 18 • §3. Time and Inner-Temporality in Aristotle's
Physics IV 38 • §4. Augustine and the Subjectivization of Time 67

PART 2. TIME 95
§5. The Stakes for a Phenomenology of Time and Its Differentiation
from the Metaphysics of Time 95
A. THE GUIDING THREAD OF THE SUBJECT 98
§6. The Aporiae of the Constitution of Time 98 • §7. The Ambivalence
of Temporality in Sein und Zeit 103
B. THE OTHER GUIDING THREAD: TIME AND CHANGE 109
§8. The Phenomenological Amplitude of the Concept of Change 109 •
§9. The Inner-Temporality of Facts: First Approach to the Temporal
Phenomenon 113 • §10. The Event as Guiding Thread 123 •
§11. The Event as Temporalization of Time 128

ix
PART 3. TEMPORALITY 149
§12. From Time to Temporality 149 • §13. The Having-Taken-Place and
Memory 155 • §14. The Future and Availability 171 • §15. The Present and
Transformation 185 • §16. The Temporal Meaning of Selfhood 192 •
§17. The Mobility of the Adventure and Freedom 200 • §18. The Antithetic
Phenomenon of Selfhood and Its Temporal Meaning. An Example:
Traumatism 202 • §19. Recapitulation: The Articulation of Time
and of Temporality 206 • §20. The Finitude of Temporality 213 •
§21. The Unity of My Histories 227

Notes 241
Index 267

x • Contents
Preface to the Second French Edition

When we are writing it, a book occupies our attention so much that it
conceals everything else from our view; we need to be detached from it in
order to begin to see it. This is what makes the gaze that we train on it so
painful when time has passed, like the look upon a dear one with whom
we have just begun to get acquainted at the very instant he is going away.
We begin to discern all of its faults and limits. Whereas our love should be
more severe, it becomes tainted with self-indulgence, if not with self-
delusion. Courage is necessary when publishing a book, but it is almost
always out of weakness that one reissues it.
Event and Time was the second panel of a dyptich, the first panel of
which, Event and World, set out the main lines of an "evential hermeneu-
tics," an elucidation of the human being from the viewpoint of a herme-
neutical phenomenology that considers the capacity to experience events-
that is to say, critical upheavals of his life as a whole-as one of the
ownmost features of this living being. The question that oriented my re-
search in this work-complementary to that of the first part of this inquiry
and completing the entire enterprise-was the following: what must the
phenomenological characteristics of time be in order that something like
a radical newness could come to light in it? How must we conceive the
break in time and the time of the break? Supposing that an essential plot is
knit between event and time, how should we account for time in order to
render intelligible the occurring of events in it, and how should we account
for the event in order to make visible in it the temporalization of time?

xi
 Indeed, the event is not accessorily or accidentally temporal: declaring
itself after the fact as the event that it was in light of its subsequent destiny,
of its future, it is only the movement of its own taking time/temporalization
[temporisationltemporalisationJ and only gives itself to a belated and retro-
spective experience. There is nothing gratuitous in the Levinassian para-
dox: "The great 'experiences' of our life have properly speaking never been
lived." 1 They will only be lived after and according to the measure of the
future that they open, of the fissure that they make in our own adventure.
It is necessary, as a consequence, to rethink temporality itself in light of
the event and of its phenomenality.
This attempt is not without a relation to that undertaken by Bergson
starting from an entirely different horizon of preoccupations and prob-
lems. The philosopher of duration had already isolated as characteristic of
metaphysical approaches to time (and by "metaphysical" he meant acer-
tain historical closure of what is thinkable for the Western mind) their
complete failure to appreciate newness. The time of metaphysics is without
any real surprise. But instead of accounting for this recovery of the very
dimension of the new (of the radically new) by a "spatialization" of" dura-
tion" qua continuous bursting forth of unforeseeable newness, I gave a very
different form to this intuition. That which determines the frame of
thought in which the metaphysical approaches to time as a whole move is
that time is apprehended there in light of concepts (change, passage,
becoming, transition, flow, permanence) that only legitimately apply to
inner-temporal phenomena. What metaphysics thus recovers is what one
might call the "chronological difference," that which must be established
between the (inner-) temporal features of the phenomena subjected to
becoming and the features of time itsel£ In other words, metaphysics con-
ceives time as such by "projecting" it, so to speak, in time.
Clearly this thesis is not identical to that defended by Heidegger when
he was determining the "vulgar" concept of time-that is to say, the inter-
pretation of time reigning from one end to the other of the history of
metaphysics (or, as he called it at the time of Sein und Zeit, of "traditional
onto1ogy") , as "a sequence o f' nows ' w h"1ch are constant1y 'present-to- h an d'
(vorhanden)." 2 What distinguishes my thesis from Heidegger's is not only,
or even primarily, that such a concept of time is rather difficult to attribute
to thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Husserl, or Bergson; it
is, more fundamentally, that such a characterization of time-supposing
that it can be historically attested-represents only a consequence of the
more general specification that I put forward. In order that time may be
"reduced" to a succession of nows, it is necessary that it be conceived in
terms of succession-that is to say, that a concept be applied to it that pos-

xii • Preface to the Second French Edition

sesses pertinence only for describing phenomena that unfold in time.
Moreover, the flaw in the Heideggerian thesis is that it authorizes main-
taining in place the difference between an originally "subjective" time
(that which is characterized by starting from three "temporalizing" atti-
tudes: expectation, retention, and making-present or enpresenting) and a
time of things, or "world-time"; now, one of the theses that follows instead
from my analyses is that the spiritualization/subjectivization of time that
is accomplished first in Augustine and reigns up to and through Husserl
and Heidegger is only, in turn, a consequence of the failure to recognize the
"chronological difference." In order that time may be conceived as origi-
nally subjective, as identical to the movement of the expectation that
changes itself into attention and of the attention that changes itself into
retention, it is necessary that it be first understood and apprehended itself
in light of inner-temporality.
But all these indications remain formal for as long as we have not en-
tered into the living detail of phenomenological analyses. The marking out
of the main features of a metaphysics of time is, indeed, only the prelimi-
nary to an analysis of time as such, allowing us to give full consideration
to the event and to its radical newness. How can we understand this new-
ness? This problem is at the heart of the work that you will read, and it is
impossible to resolve in a few words. It requires first of all an under-
standing of the level at which the question itself is posed. Not that of an
objective analysis of phenomena in the physical objective world, but that
of an experience of the phenomena such that they can be described in the
first person: the newness of a fact that occurs suddenly and "takes me by
surprise" has meaning only at the level of what Husserl called Lebenswelt,
the life-world. The adequate formulation of this problem demands next
that we understand how the failure to recognize the newness is structurally
bound up with the frame of thinking in which the different metaphysics
of time are set forth. In reality the metaphysics of time not only conceives
of time in light of that which is inner-temporal, it also conceives of inner-
temporality in an inadequate way.
This point is probably not explicit enough in Event and Time, and it
would call for a recasting of certain of its descriptions. Indeed, the newness
is not only a feature of the event in the strong sense that I give to this
term-the event in the evential sense-but also and already a feature of
what I call the innerworldly fact. What is more, this newness does not
contradict the foreseeable character of certain facts. We can expect their
occurrence, and they will not be any the less new at the moment in which
they are brought about, for there will always be something unexpected in
them, even if it is only their unique qualitative imprint. It is not enough to

Preface to the Second French Edition • xiii

describe inner-temporality on the basis of two series of phenomena: a parte
subjecti, an expectation that changes itself into attention and an attention
that changes itself into memory, and a parte objecti, a change of temporal
status by virtue of which a fact is first "to come," then "present," and finally
"past"; for, before occurring, a fact possesses no kind ofpresence whatsoever,
not even that of an ens diminutum, of a being in representation; its future
is not of the present in suspense, and its occurring in no way signifies a mere
change of temporal status that would affect an immutable quasi-subject;
the fact anticipated as future does not become present for the simple reason
that it does not become-rather, it advenes or occurs, in such a way that,
when it happens, its newness is complete: what we are dealing with is a
pure bursting forth, a pure genesis, a change from nothing into something.
Inner-temporality can be described as the becoming-past of the future only
if one adopts the viewpoint of the already happened or occurred fact and
describes it from such a viewpoint, thereby denying the most important
difference that there is: that which opposes the possible and the actual, the
future and the present.
It is precisely this difference that the metaphysics of time has the ten-
dency to hide. If the time of metaphysics can be characterized, in a first
approximation, as the becoming-present of the future and the becoming-
past of the present, it is first of all because the dimensionals of time (the
future, the past, the present) are identified with the features of that which
occurs in time ("being present," "being past"); but it is also, in the second
place, because the very occurring of that which happens in time, its advent,
is conceived as a mere change affecting something already there, already
present or quasi-present, the future being thought of only as a present "in
waiting." The time of metaphysics is a time in which everything "passes
away" because nothing truly happens there, or, what amounts to the same
thing, because what happens there only becomes, is already there virtually
before happening and, consequently, in no way happens.
Of course, the newness of the fact, if it prefigures that of the event, is
nevertheless not identical with it. There is the newness of that which does
not match with our expectations, at least up to a certain point-the new-
ness of that which, even when foreseeable, always announces itself in a way
that is qualitatively unique and unanticipatable; but there is also the new-
ness of that which does not so much thwart our expectations as strike our
projects as such at their root-by overturning them. Because it is not re-
duced to an unmatched expectation, because it is one with the overturning
of our best-laid projects, those which gave shape to our existence as per-
manent self-projection, the in-breaking of the event brings with it a sur-
prise that does not end with its occurring and that signifies a rupture of

xiv • Preface to the Second French Edition

meaning in the cohesion of our lives and our histories. The great events of
our life never entirely lose their surprising character, which is their most
lasting mark.
It is to such events, to such a surprise and to such a novation, that the
analyses of this book are in the first place dedicated. In taking them as the
guiding thread, the goal is not only to analyze the time of the event, its
structurally deferred occurring, but also the temporality of our experience
itself-an experience that is not interrupted with the cessation of the fact,
but is one with the continuous movement of an appropriation of it and of
a distantiation with respect to it. This movement belongs to memory in its
evential sense, not as a mere faculty of recollection, but as a memory of the
possible that is also, and at the same time, a faculty of self-renewal under
the constraint of what happens to us. By deepening this point Event and
Time allows us to take a further step in relation to Event and World. Its
epicenter is a conception of selfhood and freedom-related notions, since
to be oneself is to manifest one's freedom, and inversely, to be free is to be
fully oneself-as a capacity for self-transformation and transformation of
one's existence, or, as I say in the book, of one's adventure. Since its first
publication, some of these questions have been taken up and deepened in
my book Laventure temporelle (Paris: Quadrige, 2010). Let me add that
this edition of Event and Time includes a number of corrections of and
modifications to the text.
If, for a book that is rather difficult, its reappearance in a portable for-
mat is an enviable chance, it is above all for me the opportunity to once
again measure the scope of what remains to be done.

November 10, 2011

Preface to the Second French Edition • xv

Blank page
Translator's Note

This book is a partner to Event and World and thus shares much of that
book's vocabulary. Whenever possible, I have used the same translations
that Shane Mackinlay, the translator of Event and World, employed for key
terms and concepts.
The author, Claude Romano, was closely involved in the final prepara-
tion of this translation. He not only suggested corrections to each page of
the translation but made many clarifications of and even corrections to the
French text. In a sense this translation can be considered as something like
a third edition of Event and Time.
I would like to thank Claude Romano and the editors at Fordham
University Press for the patience they showed during the long gestation of
this translation.

xvii
Blank page
Event and Titne
Blank page
Introduction

In his Notebooks, Paul Valery wrote, "The word time is only provisional." 1
It may still be so for us; but if this word is to resonate otherwise than as a
mere incantation, it must be possible to submit it to an analysis that starts
from the things themselves, from a phenomenon given to all and available for
an interpretation. Does such a "phenomenon" exist? And, if so, is it sepa-
rable from the history of its interpretation? Is there, in itself, independent
of this history, "time" as such? Nothing is less certain. Valery's precaution
is not in the least bit oratorical.
There is no "question of time" that could be posed to us in a timeless
manner. The question of what makes up the unity of the different phe-
nomena generally grouped under the rubric of "time" cannot be resolved
before it has even been posed. "Time" is first of all the chain of historically
attested, successive interpretations of this "phenomenon." There is nothing
"given" or immediately evident in this. But that time appears, in the unity
of its phenomenal determinations, first of all as a problem, in no way signi-
fies that the questioning of it would lose itself here in purely verbal quib-
bles, in a "nominalism" of principle, without any phenomenon susceptible
to bearing the weight of a conceptual analysis. As Heidegger liked to say,
it is precisely to the extent that "we have eyes with which to see" that a
philosophical hermeneutics can surmount both historical tautology and
nominalist quibbling in order to establish itself in this decisive place, in
the space between experience and history, holding in one hand the guiding
thread of the latter and diving into the former in search of answers. By

1
establishing a circular back-and-forth movement between history and
experience, hermeneutics unfolds as phenomenology. In this sense there is
no hermeneutics that, if it wishes to be philosophical, is not also, at the
same time, phenomenological. This affirmation has its counterpart: phe-
nomenology, in its turn, is only possible as hermeneutics. But what does
this expression, "hermeneutic phenomenology," mean?
"Phenomenology": to begin with, the word does not merely signify an
orientation toward the "things themselves." It is true that this philo-
sophical discipline is born from the precept of method according to which
it is fitting to begin from phenomena, and from them alone, in order to
furnish a description of them: "Don't go looking for anything beyond
phenomena," wrote Goethe. "They are themselves [ ... J the doctrine." 2
Consequently, it is necessary to exclude, from the very beginning as non-
pertinent, every consideration of a hypothetical order, which is to say, ev-
ery explanation of what shows itself by means of assumed or alleged causes,
every enterprise of "metaphysical" foundation of the phenomenal "given."
The phenomenological method takes as a fundamental presupposition that
a good description not only takes the place of understanding, but is this
understanding itself. To describe a phenomenon beginning from itself is
to understand, with regard to it, all there is to understand. In this regard
the positive sciences are situated on another plane than philosophy: in
their enterprise of explanation and prediction, they always presuppose at
least an implicit phenomenology of their object. They cannot, in any case,
substitute themselves for this phenomenology.
Regarding this presupposition, hermeneutics brings an essential coun-
terpart, which is equivalent to a bending of method: there are never any
phenomena that would be given as such to description-there is no im-
mediacy of a givenness from which one might expect all the light to come:
every access to phenomena is irremediably mediated. We should renounce
the myth of a "pure given," bound up with that myth (Cartesian and Hus-
serlian) of a total absence of presuppositions of which description could
avail itsel£ The transparency of an original contact with experience, which
could be established through intuition, is here thoroughly discredited by
the necessity of a historical detour and a historical course, only at the end
of which the "phenomenon" will allow itself to be apprehended and "seen."
The affirmation of the necessity of a critique-or even a "destruction"-of
the tradition here goes hand in hand with the impossibility of every defini-
tive interpretation-that is to say, an interpretation freed from every pre-
supposition. But relativism in no way follows if the word signifies a variant
of skepticism, the objective impossibility of deciding between several ex-
egeses. Philosophical hermeneutics has at its disposal two criteria for de-

2 • Introduction
ciding between competing interpretations: namely, (1) their capacity to
account for a more or less great number of phenomena (one interpretation
is more powerful than another if it makes phenomena intelligible that the
other interpretation, by virtue of its presuppositions, did not and could not
take into consideration); and (2) their capacity to account for the same
phenomena with more or less internal coherence. On one hand, power; on
the other, coherence.
These brief methodological considerations clarify the way of proceeding
that this essay will follow. The attempt to elucidate the temporal phenom-
enon is preceded here because governed by two series of preliminary ques-
tions that bear on the history of the understanding of time and on its
presuppositions. First: is there or is there not a nexus of common problems
preordaining to the different doctrines of time their hermeneutic horizon,
integrating them into an ensemble that one could qualify, in a very generic
manner, with the label "metaphysics of time"? And, if so, in what do they
consist? Second: how can we understand that time, from Augustine to Hus-
serl and even to Heidegger, has been apprehended fundamentally as a
"subjective" phenomenon, no matter how the subjectivity of the "subject"
in question has been interpreted in each case? Is this "subjectivization" of
time necessary? What phenomenal features of time confer on it its right
and its justification? Is it even possible to give it a justification of any kind
on the plane of phenomena? Isn't another interpretation of time possible
and legitimate, or even required, by the aporiae that result from the first?
What criteria must such an interpretation of time outside the subject satisfy?
In these conditions, what prescribes for such an interpretation its guiding
thread?
I will attempt to answer, at least in part, these considerable and proba-
bly excessive questions in the first part of this work. Let me emphasize that
these questions could never have been posed without the unavoidable con-
tribution of Heidegger, to which frequent reference will be made. He is the
one who was the first to advance the thesis of a unitary constitution of
metaphysics based on the primacy of the present and of presence for the
understanding of the meaning of Being. This guiding interpretation,
which governs the apprehension of the temporal phenomenon since Aris-
totle, is designated, in Sein und Zeit, by the name "ordinary concept of time
(vulgaren Zeitbegrijf)": "Thus for the ordinary understanding of time, time
shows itself as a sequence of 'nows' which are constantly 'present-at-hand,'
simultaneously passing away and coming along (eine Folge von standig
'vorhandenen,' zugleich vergehenden und ankommenden fetzt)." 3 But this
thesis of a unitary constitution of metaphysics rooted in a community of
interpretation of the temporal phenomenon cannot be accepted without

Introduction • 3
further scrutiny; it calls for a critical testing that will occupy the first part
of this essay.
To go straight to the point: it does not seem possible to me to define
the common hermeneutical horizon within which the attempts of Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, or Husserl take place in view
of furnishing an elucidation of the "nature" of time, on the basis of the
"ordinary concept of time" as Heidegger defined it. Even Aristotle, whose
famous definition of time put forth in Physics, Book IV: rouro yap £crnv 6
xp6voc;, ap18µoc; KlV~CYEW<; KCTTCx TO rrp6rt::pov KCTl UCYTEpov ("For time is just
this-number of motion in respect of anterior and posterior") 4 serves Hei-
degger as a paradigm to illustrate this ordinary understanding of time-
even Aristotle in no way defines time as a succession of nows whose mode
of being would be that of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), since he ex-
cludes on principle that time is constituted of nows that would be its
"parts." Not only is the now not a part of time, but neither is it thinkable
as a urroKdµt::vov; it is not, as opposed to the moving object that remains
identical throughout change, the same as itself and other than others; it is
both inseparably other and the same: other than itself, the same as every
other. Only nows constituted in themselves as identical substrates could
"succeed themselves" one after another in a time apprehended according
to the scheme of passage. But for Aristotle, on the contrary, the now nei-
ther passes nor remains; it is not itself inner-temporal: it makes possible the
transition of things in time according to modalities that remain to be de-
scribed. In short, the understanding of time that Aristotle develops is not
univocally inner-temporal. Rather, it oscillates according to an ambivalence
that will be found again elsewhere and that appears structural of the meta-
physics of time, between an understanding that forbids reducing the tem-
poral phenomenon to the inner-temporality of what "passes" or "becomes"
in time and an interpretation that tends to identify time itself with the
inner-temporality of phenomena in general.
But if the Heideggerian definition of the "ordinary concept of time" is
insufficient for grasping the originality and determining the fundamental
characteristics of the metaphysics of time, is there a way, despite every-
thing, to capture a continuity between such seemingly different attempts
as those of Plato and Husserl, to cite only them? Yes, perhaps. The very
general problem that all these attempts must confront is that of the rela-
tions that unite the phenomenon of time to that of inner-temporality.
First, time gives itself to be "seen," in effect, through a multiplicity of
changes: the biological phenomenon of aging, the cosmological phenomena
of the alternation between day and night, of the seasons, and so on. At
issue here, in each case, are changes that operate in time or in conformity

4 • Introduction
with time-in other words, changes the description of which suppose the
alternation of temporal predicates such as: "to come," "present," "past." A
same p h enomenon appears fi rst as "to come, " t h en as "present, " t h en as
"past," and it is solely with regard to the sequence of these changing tem-
poral predicates that it can be said, precisely, to have changed. But is time
itself a change of this sort? And consequently, is the alternation of temporal
predicates, such that it appears necessarily implicated in the possibility of
describing the inner-temporal phenomenon of change, time itself? That
would imply that one could conceive time as a change that, in order to be
described, would in turn call for an alternation of temporal predicates: the
description would be inevitably drawn into an infinite regression. Suppos-
ing, then, that one conceived time as a change, it would be necessary to
suppose again a time in which such a change would be operated, which is
to say a time in which time would unroll, and so on, ad infinitum. The para-
dox in which the description of time appears caught is thus that of the
necessity and, at the same time, ofthe impossibility of an infinite regression.
We cannot conceive time, analyze it, or describe it without conceiving it as
something temporal; and yet reasons of principle appear to rule out think-
ing of it in this way.
It is this problem, I believe, that fixes over the different attempts to ana-
lyze time since Plato their common hermeneutical horizon. These attempts
are caught in the double, contradictory necessity: to seize and to describe
time as a certain "phenomenon," to conceive it as something temporal, and
at the same time, so to speak, to maintain the difference of time and of
change, to refuse every possibility of apprehending time in the light of the
inner-temporality of what "passes" or unfolds in it. Parmenides' aporiae
relative to time are already grounded on this difficulty, which they attempt
to make manifest and which they resolve, not without irony, in the para-
doxical position of the £~a:{cpvf1c;, neither temporal nor supratemporal. It is
this same problematic horizon that fixes its meaning on the analysis of
time carried out by Aristotle in book IV of the Physics. It is only at the
moment in which the edge of this aporia begins to be dulled, or, in other
words, when the paradox of an inner-temporal grasp of time appears
little by little hidden from view, and thus when it becomes possible to
describe and analyze time without remainder like a certain change, or
rather like change itself, that the question will undergo a decisive modi-
fication. The question will be that of what enables such a change-what,
so to speak, "pours" the future into the past through the bottleneck of the
present and, consequently, since time is itself a sort of "passage," a "succes-
sion" or "flowing," what gives it a permanent, unchanging structure. The
"subjectivization" of time, or more precisely, its transfer to the mind operated

Introduction • 5
in Augustine's Confessions, responds quite precisely to this problem. The
change that is in things, the change of things themselves, must here refer
back to a change inherent in the mind-that of the expectation that
changes into attention and of attention that changes into memory-as to
the change that makes possible and conditions every other. Henceforth-
and this is probably the decisive point-it is only when the ambivalence that
I underscored above regarding Aristotle is dispelled in favor of a grasping of
time itself in inner-temporal terms, when the paradox put forth by Plato in
the Parmenides disappears entirely from the field of analysis, that time can
take on a "subjective" status. Consequently, far from the transfer of time to
subjectivity, such that it reigns without reserve in modern metaphysics
since Kant, bringing a satisfying solution to the aporia of an analysis of
time as such in inner-temporal terms, this transfer rests, on the contrary, on
its forgetting. But what is forgotten, in this case, is not purely and simply
lost: the aporia reappears, for example, in an exemplary manner in the Hus-
serlian analysis of time. It haunts, as I will try to show, every enterprise
aiming to search for the origin of "objective" time in the contrasting acts,
behaviors, and modes of Being of a subjectivity that is allegedly originary.
Henceforth, the question becomes the following: is it not best, so as to
avoid the insurmountable difficulties in which a thinking of time in inner-
temporal terms becomes caught, to change horizon entirely, which is to say,
to begin by removing the temporal phenomenon from the horizon in
which its subjectivization took place, and then from the horizon of the
subject itself? Is it not necessary to conceive of time as such hors-sujet,
outside of the subject, so to speak? But to attempt to undo the slowly and
patiently knotted tie between time and subjectivity is in no way to return
to a purely "objective" understanding of becoming. This enterprise de-
mands, more radically, the questioning of the presuppositions that govern
the understanding of the human being as subject so as to put them as such
to the test. It is precisely on this point that the project of this book joins up
with that of a preceding work to complete it and lead it to its end. In Event
and World the issue was to elaborate a hermeneutics of the human being
according to the guiding thread of the event and thus to remove the under-
standing of the "advenant," which is to say the one for whom the whole
adventure consists in "advening" to himself [a advenir asoi] on the basis of
what happens [advient] to him, from every possible understanding in
terms of "subject." Indeed, the subject is that to which nothing occurs, and
to which nothing can ever occur; that which always holds itself "behind"
or "under" its accidents, that which, by its deep-seated immunity with
regard to every event, remains identical to itself even in its alterations. The
"subject," understood in this sense, still haunts the Husserlian transcen-

6 • Introduction
dental ego, but also, to a large extent, the Heideggerian Dasein. This is
why the "change of horizon" of which I was speaking, that which would
eventually make possible an interpretation of time itself hors-sujet, can and
must be accomplished on behalf of a phenomenology centered on the
event. The analysis of temporality that will be carried out in the second
and third parts of this book thus constitutes at the same time both a re-
prise and a deepening of the evential hermeneutics [l) hermeneutique evene-
mentiale] developed in Event and World.
This essay thus appears as the second panel of a dyptich. I have tried, as
much as was possible, to present a text the reading of which would not be
hampered by too many heavy presuppositions; I have sometimes recalled,
at the risk of repeating myself, some points already evoked in the preceding
book if they conditioned the understanding of what follows. In most cases
I was content to refer in footnotes to corresponding paragraphs in Event
and World. Despite these artifices, an understanding of the present text and
of the theses that it develops is more than facilitated by the reading of the
essay whose counterpart it forms: reading Event and World is its indispens-
able complement.
But because phenomenology never has at its disposal an immediate ac-
cess to phenomena, because phenomena offer themselves to interpretation
only through a chain of historical presuppositions from which they are
rigorously inseparable, because, in other words, phenomenology is possible
only as hermeneutic, throwing oneself immediately into an analysis of time
without first interrogating the presuppositions that guide its understand-
ing is rigorously ruled out. Thus it is fitting to begin with the "metaphysics
of time," or rather to inquire in order to know ifand under what conditions
some such thing indeed exists. The necessity of this "detour" will truly
appear only at the end of the investigation.
For no detour is ever a mere excursus when we are dealing with philoso-
phy: as the Phaedrus reminds us, "[ ... J if the way round is long, don't be
astonished: we must make this detour for the sake of things that are very
important." 5

Paris, 12 February 1998

Introduction • 7
Blank page
 PART [!]

The Metaphysics of Time

The Beginning that sits enshrined as a goddess among mortals is the Savior
of all.
-Plato, Laws Vl.775e1

Historically speaking, what has been understood under the designation

"time"? How can we grasp the guiding lines of the interpretation of this
phenomenon, insofar as they delineate the contours of the thought upon
which we depend and that Heidegger, following Nietzsche, called
"metaphysical"?
Of course, this question presupposes two things: first, what in fact it
will be my task to establish-namely, that the temporal problematic un-
folds, historically, within a unitary horizon, or, in other words, that there
is something like the one metaphysics; second, that what determines this
metaphysics as such is indeed, among other things, a certain approach to the
temporal phenomenon: a certain understanding of time that unfolds in-
side of a conceptual frame remaining unchanged from Aristotle to Bergson
or to Husserl. But what, then, is this "frame"? How must we determine the
"squaring" of this frame? In other words, what makes the unity of this
horizon?

§1. The Traditional Determinations of Time and Their Structural

Dependence with Respect to the Phenomenon of lnner-Temporality

The fundamental determinations that articulate the traditional under-

standing of "time" have their provenance in the fact that access to this
phenomenon was mediated, from the origin, by the consideration of what
is in time. Put otherwise, time has received its fundamental determina-
tions from the exclusive consideration of the inner-temporality of temporal
"objects." Time has itself been conceived as "flowing," as "remaining," as
"passing" from the future to the present and from the present to the past,
the future "becoming" present and the present "becoming," in turn, past:

9
the phenomenon of time has presented itself to phenomenological consid-
eration as an inner-temporal phenomenon. Time has been conceived as being
in time.
But how should we account for such an affirmation and strip it of its
possible abruptness and, perhaps, even its arbitrariness? How can we make
its pertinence stand out for the rereading and the reinterpretation of the
principal texts on time that follow one another throughout the history of
metaphysics? It is necessary, first, to bring to light the intrinsic determina-
tions of inner-temporality so as to show, second, in what manner these
determinations could be, upon a transfer of meaning, attributed to time
its el£

(a) Inner-temporality, as the phenomenological

character ofwhat is "in" time
Every "thing" in the wide sense of the term-"object" from a theoretical
consideration, tool, datum of sensation (as, for example, a sound that re-
sounds), innerworldly fact, process, state of affairs-shows itself in time
inasmuch as it appears with temporal determinations that belong, as such,
to the very mode of this appearing. If we take up the example, analyzed at
length by Husserl, of a sound that occurs as an innerworldly fact or of the
articulation in sound of a melody, its temporal characters are thus the fol-
lowing: at first, the sound that has not yet resounded is awaited as a sound
"to come," which is to say as a sound that is "not yet present." Next, the
sound resounds in the present, it is heard as "present," and immediately
after, as "just past," as a sound that has just resounded, but that is no lon-
ger grasped in the full actuality of consciousness, in the present tense: this
sound "just past," which has ceased to occur in a living manner, is thus
retained or maintained under the gaze of consciousness, in a present "en-
larged" to the immediate past, 2 by an intentional modification of con-
sciousness indissociable from a correlative modification of its "object," that
Husserl calls "retention" or "primary memory"; and thus, as new sounds
are produced, as the present chases the past in renewing itself in its point
of incidence with the future, the past, through ever-new retentions,
through retentions of retention, constantly changes in itself, but neverthe-
less still maintains itself, with its sense of "modified present," of present
made-past [passeifie], in the light of consciousness. The primary memory
thus designates the specific intentional modification that the primordial
impression (Urimpression) of the sound undergoes, a modification by
which it continuously fades away and yet does not truly disappear, since
this very fading away is the mode of its persistence.

10 • The Metaphysics of Time

 Let us leave aside here the most "technical" aspects of the H usserlian
description 3 (which derive from the intentional analysis of consciousness
and from its presuppositions); that is, let us simplify this description up
to a point: I can be more specific about the above material by saying that
the description of a sound that fades away necessarily puts into play the
description of a continuous modification of the temporal characters of
the "object-sound" ("to come," then "present," then "just passed"), which
is inseparable from a continuous modification of its temporal modes ofap-
prehension: expectation (protension), attention (making-present), and "pri-
mary memory," as Husserl calls it (retention). But what is most remarkable
in this description-carried out here, as much as possible, from an entirely
"naive" standpoint, which presupposes no particular theory of conscious-
ness, of its empirical or transcendental status, of its mode of Being, of the
particular traits that define expectation, making-present, retention-
consists probably in the fact that it not only puts into play a double series
of characterizations: on the one hand, those of the object that is modified
continually in its temporal determinations, on the other, those of the
modes of consciousness of this object that are modified in parallel; but also
. o f tempora1adverb"
a senes t en."Aft
s: at fi rst,""next,""h t rst, t he sound.1s
aimed at in expectation as sound "to come"; next, it is brought about, un-
der the gaze that makes-present, as "present" sound; then, it is retained, in
the primary memory, as sound "just passed," which haunts the conscious-
ness, but without "occupying" it any longer; which resounds no longer than
as the far-off echo of its abolished vibration; that is to say, which does not
maintain itself except by rendering itself past [se passeifiant]. These three
adverbs, in appearance without particular signification, perfectly negligible
in the description, nevertheless play a decisive role in it: indeed, they indi-
cate that the continuous modification of the temporal object and the cor-
relative modification of its modes of consciousness always presuppose the
time in which they both take place and, as a consequence, cannot ofthemselves
account for its temporalization. Put otherwise: the temporal (or rather: the
inner-temporal) modifications of the object and the correlative modifica-
tions of its modes of consciousness (expectation, making-present, recollec-
tion) do not account for the temporal phenomenon except on the condi-
tion of being themselves understood as being brought about "at first" or
"next," which is to say, as occurring themselves in time.
But what does this teach us about time itself? It is still too early to an-
swer this question. For the moment, the description of the mode of tem-
poralization of the inner-temporal object has at least allowed us to put into
evidence the fact that the inner-temporality of this object does not refer
back uniquely to the modes of its temporal apprehension, but, as these are

§ 1. The Traditional Determinations of Time • 11

occurring in their turn in time, that they refer back, once again, to more
fundamental determinations, whose status and meaning remain, for the
present, indeterminate, but that are still themselves temporal determina-
tions expressed by adverbs: "at first," "next," "then." Now, if such is indeed
the case, it then follows that no psychology, whether it be phenomenologi-
cal and/or transcendental, can account for the phenomenality of time, for
its mode of appearing, on the basis solely of the modes of the consciousness
of time, without thereby presupposing the time in which these modes of
the consciousness of time occur, and that this ultimate time-about which
it is still necessary to keep in reserve the answer to the question of whether
or not it still deserves to be called "time"-is no longer something that
modifies itself while flowing out, in the manner of the object and of its
modes of consciousness, but is only that without which it would be strictly
impossible to describe such a flow.
The manner in which this problem crops up in Husserl's Lectures on the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time matters little for the
moment.4 For us, the essential lies in the following observation: the inner-
temporality of objects (innerworldy facts, processes, things, or states of
affairs) here refers back to the inner-temporality of their modes of appear-
ance (or of their modes of consciousness), without it ever being possible to
grasp in the one or the other of these phenomena the origin of the time in
which they are both possible, and that is expressed by the adverbs "at first,"
"next,""h t en. "B ut aren't "at fi rst " and" next,,,.m turn, znner-tempora
. lde-
terminations? Assuredly. I can affirm, for example, that "at first" there was
lightning, and only "next" the rumbling of thunder. These two adverbs, in
this context, refer to a specific situation within the temporal continuum.
However, such a usage of these adverbs in order to mark specific "places"
inside the irreversible sequence of objective time, or, in a different way, to
designate the modes of the appearing duration of the object-supposing
that by "temporal object" we no longer understand an isolated sound, but
a melody articulating a multiplicity of sounds-differs from the preceding
usage, where they were designating a "time" in which all the inner-
temporal changes-subjective as much as objective-were taking place.
These adverbs thus do not only have an inner-temporal signification, but
they may refer, moreover, more fundamentally to the time ofevery change,
as far as this change occurs itself" in" time. Thus, what they indicate is that
the inner-temporality of the temporal object cannot be apprehended itself
as a continuous modification of its modes of consciousness (expectation,
making-present, recollection), or as a continuous modification of its tem-
poral predicates ("to come," "present," "just passed"), without the time of
this double "modification" being, in its turn, coapprehended-a time that

12 • The Metaphysics of Time

cannot itself be grasped by the measure of inner-temporal determinations
without dragging us into an infinite regression. For time is in no way
temporal.
We can set out the results of these analyses synthetically, as follows.
1. The inner-temporality of the temporal "object" (fact, thing, state of
affairs) can be described as the unitary phenomenon of a continuous modi-
fication of its temporal modes of appearance correlative to a continuous
modification of its subjective modes of consciousness. However, neither
the continuous modification of the object nor the correlative modification
of its modes of appearance for a consciousness are sufficient to describe the
phenomenon of inner-temporality, since this double series of modifications
must, in turn, occur in time.
2. At every instant of this continuous modification of the temporal
characters of the thing, as well as of the temporal modes of its apprehen-
sion (the expectation transforming itself into making-present, which in
turn is changed into retention), nevertheless there will subsist something
like an "at first" and a "next": these adverbs, which are indispensable to every
phenomenological description of inner-temporality and which remain,
however, phenomenologically obscure, are not inner-temporal determina-
tions of the thing or of its subjective modes of givenness, but refer back to
time itself in which these modifications take place, yet without this time
appearing here in a thematic manner. When I follow the temporal modifica-
tions of the object and of its modes of appearance, I am not turned toward
the time itself in which they occur, but time is always co-given, coappre-
hended, if only in a fleeting and oblique mode, and expressed through
these apparently insignificant determinations: "at first," "then," and "next."
3. The time of "things" that are in time, inner-temporality, is thus not
time itself; but the question remains entirely open as to whether it is pos-
sible to go back from the time of things to time tout court in order to raise
the question of the temporal provenance of inner-temporality. It does not
seem possible to identify psychological or phenomenological time (what-
ever status is accorded to the "subject," empirical or transcendental), con-
stituted by the modes of appearance of the inner-temporal object, with time
itself; but, as the continuous modification of the expectation that changes
itself into making-present and of the making-present that changes itself
into memory, phenomenological time belongs, like the time of "things," to
the phenomenon of inner-temporality.
4. Finally, once we have illuminated the phenomenological features of
inner-temporality that, assuredly, allow us to describe the manner accord-
ing to which things, innerworldy facts, states of affairs, and even subjective
lived experiences ceaselessly receive changing predicates ("to come," "pres-

§ 1. The Traditional Determinations of Time • 13

ent," "passed"), the question remains entirely open as to whether it is still
possible-and how-to elucidate further the time itself in which these
modifications appear, which flashes fleetingly through the use of these
adverbs: "at first," "next," "then." Is not this path of access to time, which
tries to reach it beginning from inner-temporality, closed and as if ob-
structed in advance by its point of departure and by the very horizon in
which its questioning unfolds? Before undertaking to answer such a ques-
tion, it is nevertheless necessary to establish its legitimacy and pertinence.
Now, these will only appear if, as we shall see, time was traditionally
thought by metaphysics on the basis of the phenomenal features of what is
in time-only if time itselfwas understood, fundamentally, by metaphys-
ics within the horizon of inner-temporality.

(b) The phenomenalfeatures oftime considered within

the horizon ofinner-temporality
Before establishing our thesis more formally through a reading of some
decisive texts from the history of metaphysics, we can undertake to furnish
a brief sketch of the phenomenological meaning of this occultation of time
to the advantage of inner-temporality. Time was generally conceived as
defined, in its very essence, by the phenomenon of change. More precisely,
it is a certain "passage" that is brought about from the future "toward" the
present and from the present "toward" the past. At every new instant, the
future, determined as that which is "not yet present," becomes present,
while the present becomes past, the past being determined, in turn, as a "pres-
ent that is no longer (present)." It is this conception of a transition of times
within one another that confers upon the traditional concept of time as
"passage" its fundamental determinations.
First, time envisaged on the horizon of inner-temporality is one-
dimensional: just as the inner-temporal determinations of the thing-"to
come," "present," "past"-turn out to be modifications of its phenomeno-
logical way of appearing, which is to say, of its coming-into-presence for a
consciousness, so too, the future, the present, the past, as fundamental
dimensions of time in which the thing itself appears with its own inner-
temporal features, will turn out here to be modifications of a single dimen-
sion of time: the present. It follows, then, that the future as horizon of
appearance of every thing or of every fact to come-of the "to come" as
inner-temporal determination of the thing-will be conceived, in turn, as
a present that is not yet (present), and the past as a present that is no longer
(present). The result is that "time has only one dimension" 5 to the extent
that the future and the past, as temporal horizons, are nothing but modi-

14 • The Metaphysics of Time

fications of the present and are defined entirely by their relation to it. Even
in the "diagram of time" inserted by Husserl in division 10 of his Lectures
on the Phenomenology ofthe Consciousness ofInternal Time, two-dimensional
as it is, 6 the time it represents is no less essentially determined as a modi-
fication of a single dimension: the present; for the past and the future, as
Husserl repeatedly affirms, always constitute themselves from out of the
present, insofar as they are intentional modifications of it: ''All of the past
gains its sense in the flowing present and indeed constitutes itself out of
that flow; all of the objective past constitutes itself out of the objective
present, and the objective present constitutes itself ultimately in the struc-
ture of the 'living present.' " 7 Insofar as it is defined entirely by its relation
to the present of consciousness, the future is what will become present, that
which "will pass into" the present, which is to say will be transferred through
it in the continual movement of its own becoming-past; as for the past, it
is determined as that which became such, by a modification of the present
that it was: it is consequently nothing other than a rendered-past present.
From this first feature of time there derives a second: its transitory
character. Since the future and the past are thought of, indeed, as mere
modifications of an inner-temporal present, since the future has been de-
termined as that which is not yet (present) but is susceptible of becoming
so, and the past as that which is no longer (present) to the extent that it has
become such, by virtue of the phenomenon of "passage," there follows that
the three times can only be successive; they ceaselessly pass "into" one an-
other. When Bergson, for example, defines duration, it is in the following
terms: "Its essence being to flow, not one of its parts is still there when
another part comes along. Superposition of one part on another with mea-
surement in view is therefore impossible, unimaginable, inconceivable." 8
What Bergson here calls the "parts" of time (the future, the present, the
past) are not contemporary; they do not coexist, they succeed one another.
Now, the future, the present, and the past can thus "succeed one another"
only at the price of a pure and simple identification of these horizontal
dimensions of time with the inner-temporal modes of appearance of a fact
or a thing. But if time is pure succession, how can something as succession
exist? What makes possible the transition of the "parts" of the duration-
that is to say, also, their maintenance and persistence, without which there
would be no succession at all? Answer: memory. "There is no mood, how-
ever, no matter how simple, which does not change at every instant, since
there is no consciousness without memory, no continuation of a state with-
out the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments.
That is what duration consists 0£ Inner duration is the continuous life of
a memory which prolongs the past into the present .... Without that

§1. The Traditional Determinations of Time • 15

survival of the past in the present there would be no duration but only
instantaneity." 9 Since time is conceived as one-dimensional and successive,
it becomes necessary to give to subjectivity the function of conserving the
past in the present under the form of an overcome present [present de-
passe], and thus of "contracting" the different moments of time that "snow-
ball" and engender the duration. But the various times hadfirst to be conceived
as "successive," as "passing" into one another, so that the intervention of
memory could, by contracting them, give birth to the duration.
The one-dimensionality of time and its transitory character thus result
in a third fundamental determination of time: its continuity. Like space,
which is the "order of coexistences," time, as the "order of successions," 10
is a continuum, and this is why it can be figured, analogically, by a line, on
which the now would be a point. This analogy runs from Aristotle to Kant
and from Bergson to Husserl, unifying these conceptions of time despite
their deep differences. Thus, Kant writes in "The Transcendental Exposi-
tion of the Concept of Time," "Time is nothing but the form of inner
sense .... [I] t has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the rela-
tion of representations in our inner state. And just because this inner intu-
ition yields no shape, we endeavour to make up for this want by analogies.
We represent the time-sequence by a line progressing to infinity, in which
the manifold constitutes a series of one dimension only; and we reason
from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with this one
exception, that while the parts of the line are simultaneous the parts of
time are always successive." 11 This analogon of the "inner sense" in the
"external sense" that is the line is only an imperfect figuration of time, but
one that at least shares with it a fundamental character: its continuity.
Now, it is not the analogical figuration by the line, common to Aristotle
and Kant, and, in a certain manner, to Husserl as well, that leads them to
a certain understanding of time as continuum; it is, instead, the under-
standing of time itself against the horizon of inner-temporality, by a trans-
fer of meaning from inner-temporality to time itself, that makes possible
its analogical figuration under the form of a line upon which the now
would be a point.
In these conditions it matters little that the line is here envisaged as
already drawn, or in the very movement of its engendering, in the process
of its being under way (Bergson) 12 : for from Aristotle to Kant, the repre-
sentation of time by a line in no way signifies the identification of time and
space, the confusion of the "made" or "complete" with the "happening" or
"under way" [se faisant]. While for Aristotle time is the number of move-
ment and not of the line, for Kant himself the analogy with the line only
has validity if one considers the line in the drawing that engenders it, and

16 • The Metaphysics of Time

not at all in its completed figuration: for, while the parts of time are suc-
cessive, those of space are simultaneous. Bergson does not say otherwise. 13
In this respect, the qualitative heterogeneity that is, for Bergson, the ap-
panage of duration in no way contradicts his constantly renewed affirma-
tion 14 of the continuity of time. This is why, even in works in which time
is essentially considered in its relation to consciousness-for example, in
Husserl's Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time-it is still defined as a continuum of phases that has the particular
form of a "flux" or "flow." But time can be understood as a continuum only
if, in order to understand it, one takes as a paradigm the series of continu-
ous modifications that an inner-temporal "object" undergoes.
In the end, since time is essentially defined by its transition, since it
"flows" as a whole, and this succession of moments-each of which follows
another that always replaces it-forms a linear and successive time, the
result is that time has only one single direction: the present arising [surv-
enant] from the future becomes an accomplished past [un passe survenu],
and the future, becoming through the present, is progressively changed
into the concluded past; in a word, the future becomes present, and the
present past. Time has a sense-a direction and a meaning-that is to say,
an orientation: it is an irreversible phenomenon. But this alleged "irrevers-
ibility" of time contrasts with the reversibility of movement only to the
extent that time has been itself conceived as a certain oriented movement
in the first place, a movement that has only one sense, or one sole direction,
from the future toward the past. Its irreversibility thus follows from time's
having been grasped and apprehended according to the scheme of an
inner-temporal change, from its having been understood itself against the
horizon of inner-temporality. Only the temporal modes of appearance of
a fact or a thing can be qualified rightly as "irreversible": the sound to
come is no longer to come (and can no longer be so) once it has rung out
in the present; the present sound is no longer present (and can no longer be
so) once it has made itself past. But one cannot conclude from this that
there is an "irreversibility" of time itself
This phenomenological sketch nevertheless reveals, right away, its limits:
for it is not at all certain that throughout the course of metaphysics time has
been understood in so univocal a manner as an inner-temporal phenomenon.
Were the four characteristics that were brought to light-one-dimensionality,
transition, continuity, and irreversibility-asserted uniformly for its charac-
terization? Are there not, by contrast, thinkers who perceived the paradoxes
that a determination of time in inner-temporal terms brings with it-
moreover, who furnished an explicit thematization of these paradoxes? In
order to attempt a response to these questions, it becomes necessary to enter

§ 1. The Traditional Determinations of Time • 17

directly this time into the detail of the analyses of time of three major
authors-Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine-so as to attempt to delineate pre-
cisely the horizon of problems within which they move.

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides

That a phenomenological interpretation of time within the horizon of

inner-temporality is impossible, and impossible on principle, is revealed ad-
mirably, with a rare precision in the details, by the paradoxes of the Par-
menides. Indeed, what Plato was able to grasp with an acuity of attention
unequaled elsewhere in the entire philosophical tradition is that the phe-
nomenal determinations by means of which time is apprehended and leads
to the concept are borrowed from things, states of affairs, or events that
unfold their existence in time: that time is thought of as being in time, as
"advancing" from "now" to the "next"-that is to say, as being each time
itself something inner-temporal. Far from being that thinker who dispar-
aged the sensible and scorned becoming, Plato is, on the contrary-on the
condition of being read and interpreted according to the guiding thread of
the complex argumentation of the Parmenides-the first and the only
Greek thinker to have perceived, with incomparable penetration, the apo-
riae that result from a grasping of time in light of inner-temporal
determinations.
The most decisive passages for the approach of this question of time are
located in the third hypothesis of the Parmenides: "If the One is and is
not," which itself furnishes an alternative to and a way out from the theo-
retical impasses where the contradictory character of the first two hypoth-
eses wound up: (1) "If the One is One" (137c); and (2) "If the One is"
(142b). These two hypotheses, of the One as One and of the One being,
have shown, indeed, that the One was irreducible to the alternative of
beingness and non-beingness (oucrfo/µ~ oucrfo); here, what is proper to the
dialectic, as Plato had indicated ever since the Republic, is precisely to
make appear the irreducibility of the Principle to the opposition of being-
ness and non-beingness, of Being and of Becoming, of Movement and of
Rest so as to show its remarkable transcendence: "dialectic is the only in-
quiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding
to the first Principle (apx~) itself," to the unhypothetical. 15 This progressive
"doing away with" or destruction of hypotheses appears in the Parmenides
as the only possible way of access to the One that transcends them all,
opening the way to an apophatic theology that will take wing in "neo-
Platonism."16 What is thus revealed by the contradictory hypotheses rela-
tive to the Same and the Other, Rest and Movement, Being and Non-

18 • The Metaphysics of Time

being, is the ungraspability of the Principle that holds itself "beyond"
(£rr£K£1va:) these oppositions: the transcendence already evoked at the end
of book VI of the Republic, where the One (that is to say, the idea of the
Good: i8£a: TOU aya:Sou) is designated as holding itself EITEKElVCX: rfic; oucrfoc;,
beyond beingness, eliciting the astonishment of Glaucon: 8mµ6vrnc;
urrt::pBo.Afic;: "What divine transcendence!" 17
Now, it is in no way fortuitous that it is precisely within this framework,
namely the framework of a "henology" and not at all of an "ontology"-a
henology that nevertheless takes up point by point, and not without evi-
dent irony, the different moments of the Parmenidian ontology18-that
Plato states the most profound and decisive theses of his entire work on the
subject of time. Nor is it fortuitous that it is precisely in this dialogue,
where Parmenides is made the spokesman of Plato, and in that way moves
beyond the scholastic positions of the Eleatic philosophers (in particular
those of his disciple Zeno), going so far as to lead us into a vertiginous
questioning of his own principles, that this meditation on time is devel-
oped, about which I will be eager to show that it is in no way "sophistical,"
thus running contrary to the most widespread interpretations, but that it
instead possesses an irreducible phenomenological core; Parmenides, in-
deed, who in expelling Becoming from Being in his Poem, argues that TO
£6v, being, is immobile and eternal, unable in any way to be thought or
said as non-being: "Never shall you bend the non-beings (µ~ £6vra:) to be-
ing (dvm); hold your thought back from this route of inquiry" 19 ; conse-
quently, being is non-engendered and imperishable, it is "always now (£rrd
vuv £crnv)." 20 If being, indeed, is one and cannot be forcibly bent to non-
being, we must not think or say of it that it "has been" or that it "will be":
being without any relation to non-being, to ne-ens, this being is without
any relation whatsoever to time. By looking more closely at Parmenide's
thesis, the Platonic dialogue that bears his name shows its aporiae, turning
the thesis against its author: beginning, this time, no longer from being in
order to affirm that it is one (and thus unchangeable and eternal, the hu-
man doxa alone, as in a dream, thinking of it as being mobile, multiple,
subject to birth and to death), but from the One itself, the hypotheses that
compose the second part of the Parmenides will show both that being must
be one in order to be, and that the One, as such, transcends all its "onto-
logical" determinations, thus holding, by its very transcendence with re-
gard to beingness, a paradoxical "relation" to time: in no way becoming,
it is the enigmatic (arorrov) outside-of-time [hors-temps] that neither
changes nor remains the same, but also that that, under the figure of the
£~a:{cpvric;, the "sudden," makes possible all inner-temporal becoming and
change.

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 19

 The texts having to do with time are distributed, in the Parmenides,
within each of the three opening hypotheses (141a and following; 152a sq.;
156b sq.); these three passages maintain among one another evident struc-
tural relations, and every effort at interpretation cannot fail to illuminate
them, as far as possible, in relation to one another. The first hypothesis-
"the One is One"-which refuses any plurality to the One, consequently
also refuses its being a whole (mxv), since the whole supposes parts, by defi-
nition multiple, and consequently, supposes having limits, such or such
form, being enveloping or enveloped, being in a place, being in itself or in
other than itsel£ Without parts the One purely one is neither in movement
nor at rest, since movement and rest cannot be said except of that which
has within itself parts, limits, and a figure; it is thus neither the same nor
other, since these determinations only belong to a being subject to move-
ment and change, neither like nor unlike, neither equal nor unequal. To
this extent it can be neither equal nor unequal to itself or to another in
age-that is to say, older or younger: which amounts to claiming that it is
not "in time" (£v xp6vcp). The passage in which this last point is established
calls for closer examination: " 'Therefore, the one could not be younger or
older than, or the same age as, itself or another.'-'Apparently not.'-'So
if it is like that, the one could not even be in time at all, could it? Or isn't
it necessary, if something is in time, that it always come to be older than
itself?'-'Necessarily'" (141a; Plato: Complete Works, 375 [hereafter PCW]).
Here it is the problem of aging that prescribes its horizon to the question-
ing about time; this horizon is the very one that belongs to every inner-
temporal being: to be in time (£v xp6vcp) is to become always older than
onesel£ Plato's problem is whether the One who is One (the One of the
first hypothesis) can satisfy this condition. But what precisely does it mean
to satisfy this condition? Inner-temporality appears here as a comparative
relation to oneself (yet, by hypothesis, the One qua One cannot be com-
pared, neither to itself nor to another; it is neither like nor unlike, neither
equal nor unequal: consequently, it will not be able to satisfy this condi-
tion). This becoming-older (than oneself) thus supposes a change with
regard to something: as a comparative relation, it supposes a comparan-
dum, a second entity. Now, this comparandum is a comparative that Par-
menides introduces right away, not without surprising his interlocutor:
"'Isn't the older always older than a younger?'-'To be sure.'-'Therefore,
that which comes to be older than itself comes to be, at the same time,
younger than itself, if in fact it is to have something it comes to be older
than"' (141a-c; PCW, 375). Some commentators, following the example
of Dies, do not hesitate here to qualify the Platonic argumentation as "so-
phistical": "The genre of this sophism is a misuse of language, which the

20 • The Metaphysics of Time

Republic denounces in the expression 'stronger than oneself' (430e). But
the Charmides (168a-169c) had already proclaimed, with regard to mag-
nitudes and numbers, the evidence of the principle: there cannot be a rela-
tion where there is no real duality of the relata. Otherwise, indeed, what
one deems to be heavier than oneself must at the same time be lighter, 'the
older will be younger, and so on.' "21 Before declaring the "evidence" of this
principle, it is worth taking into account the context in which it applies:
now the context here is not, as it was in the Charmides, one of magnitudes
and numbers, but that of becoming. And how could there be, concerning
the phenomenon of becoming, some such "duality of comparanda"? It is
the One, in fact, that becomes at the same time older than itself and
younger, and the comparison is a comparison with one sole comparandum,
a relation that relates to itself at two different moments of becoming. In
other terms, it is the attention to the phenomenon of time that imposes, in
this singular context, the adoption of a "sophism" in order to account for the
"thing itself" that Plato has in view. It could very well be, hereafter, that the
same type of argument that could be taxed as "sophistic" in another con-
text reveals itself as entirely appropriate to the elucidation of the phenom-
enon under consideration. 22 But what, then, is this phenomenon that Plato
has "in view"?
It is the phenomenon of an oriented change: time, says Plato, "moves
forward" (he also speaks of "progression," rrpo'iov: 152c2), "proceeding from
the before to the after" (EK rou rror£ de; £rr£1nx) (152b5; PCW, 384, trans.
modified) 23 and, to this extent, the One that is in time "ages," comes to be
older than itself: thus, the One of the second hypothesis "always comes to
be older than itself, if in fact it goes forward in step with time" (152a). But,
at the same time in which it ages, the One also becomes younger than itself:
To apa rrpt::crBurEpov ECTUTOU y1yv6µt::vov CTVCTYK11 KCTl VEWTEpov aµa ECTUTOU
y{yvt::cr8m: " 'That which comes to be older than itself must also, at the
same time (apa), come to be younger than itself'" (141c). The question that
necessarily arises at this point is the following: what is Plato speaking
about when he speaks of the One that is in time? Is he speaking of a thing
that becomes? Or is what he is speaking about in no way a thing? The an-
swer will vary inside of each of the hypotheses. The One of the first hy-
pothesis, the One that is One, has within itself no plurality of parts, no
form, no figure; it is absolutely not a "thing" that becomes in time. Things
will be otherwise for the One of the second hypothesis, intimately parceled
out and fragmented into a multiplicity of beings. But what remains con-
stant in all of these hypotheses are precisely the conditions that the One must
satisfy in order to be able to be said and thought as being in time: these condi-
tions are set forth from the first hypothesis and will not vary afterward; in

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 21

order to be in time (£v xp6vcp), or again, in order to come to be, the One
must satisfy the apparently contradictory conditions of an aging and of a
rejuvenation. But can a thing, in general, satisfy such conditions? Can
Socrates become both older and younger at the same time?
Not only is this affirmation not absurd, but Plato even argued for it
expressly in a passage of the Symposium (207d), where, regarding a living
thing, he affirms that it never ceases to become younger: v£oc; ad
y1yv6µt::voc;. Here is the passage: "Even while each living thing is said to be
alive and to be the same-as a person is said to be the same from child-
hood till he turns into an old man-even then he never consists of the
same things, though he is called the same, but he is always becoming
younger and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones
and blood and his entire body. And it's not just in his body, but in his soul,
too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains,
or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him while
others are passing away." 24 Nevertheless, we must take care against a dif-
ficulty: if Socrates becomes younger, here, at the same time that he ages, it
is certainly not in the same respect. It is Socrates who ages, but it is parts of
his body-as well as ways of being of his soul-that are renewed and be-
come younger, so to speak. If, by contrast, it were Socrates as such who had
to become younger, it would be necessary that the number of his years
decrease progressively as his years grow. Or, at the least, it would be neces-
sary that the number of his years diminish in comparison to the number of
years of the same aging Socrates. It would be necessary, in sum, that there
no longer be one, but two Socrates: the one who remains young and the
one who ages, the first becoming, therefore, ever younger than the second.
But isn't such a conception of change sophistical? It presupposes, indeed,
that to change is not, for a single thing, to acquire new properties, but in-
stead to be fragmented into a plurality of things: old Socrates is another
than young Socrates in the sense that they cannot each be called "Socrates"
except by homonymy. We catch up here with a classic sophism criticized in
the Euthydemus (283d): if you want Clinias to become wise, you do not
want him any longer to be the Clinias that he is now (ignorant), and thus
you want him no longer to be: you want his death. Such a conception of
change is sophistic: like the universal mobilism of Heraclitus, it deprives the
logos of its own resources. One can no longer say, then, either that Socrates
becomes younger or that he ages, precisely because every permanent sub-
strate to which the name "Socrates" could correspond has given way.
Is it not then necessary to interpret this passage in a different way?
Shouldn't one understand that the only One that satisfies the stated re-
quirements (becoming older than oneself, becoming younger than oneself

22 • The Metaphysics of Time

while retaining the same age as oneself) is the now (ro vuv), which never
ceases at once to grow older while moving from the past toward the future,
and to grow younger while renewing itself constantly in its point of inci-
dence with the future? If we understand the text in this way, 25 we also
understand that the comparison of the now with itself admits no other term
ofcomparison than the now; that what was excluded as a sophism for every
thing-namely, that it might be greater or smaller than itself without, as
a consequence, the comparison taking place between two distinct com-
paranda-is valid for the now and for it alone, which is only relative to
itself, since it is always the same and always other, and in being temporal-
ized it temporalizes time without our ever being able to situate ourselves
outside of the now (since the now is always now) in a position that super-
vises time, which would allow us, by exiting the now, to compare it to
another now. Plato's insistence on the fact that becoming older is not said
with regard to a being younger, but rather with regard to a becoming
younger, finds its clarification in the fact that time is a change relative to
itself, where the now can be compared only to itself and does not have,
outside of itself, an other now, the second distinct term of a comparison.
If we admit that the conditions to which the One is subjected, in order
to be able to be thought as being in time (or not), put into play an under-
standing of the now as such, we can also admit that the paradoxes of the
Parmenides are in no way sophistical, but instead rest upon a rigorous,
though implicit, phenomenological analysis of time. This appears more
clearly in the second hypothesis. This new hypothesis, "If the One is,"
brings with it consequences just as absurd as the preceding hypothesis:
indeed, if we affirm that the One is, we affirm on the one hand the One,
and on the other its beingness (oucrfo), which amounts to saying that the
One-being is a whole of which unity and beingness are the parts. But thus
to introduce a duality into the One is to be brought along into a chain of
untenable consequences: for the One will be fragmented as many times as
it will be affirmed to be; to say that the One and the being are the same,
according to the thesis of Parmenides, is to admit that only the One is be-
ing and that only the being is One: but since each being is both one and
being, the One is itself henceforward distributed, as beingness, between all
the beings. There are as many £va as ovra, as many "ones" as beings. The
One is necessarily split up and scattered into a multiplicity: "the One itself,
chopped up by beingness, is many and infinite multiplicity" (144e, trans.
modified). This One that is both one and multiple is neither one nor mul-
tiple: "Unlimited by its parts, the One as all will have limits and form.
Thus, it will have inclusion in itself and in the other, movement and im-
mobility, identity and difference, likeness and unlikeness, contact and

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 23

non-contact with itself as with others, equality and inequality." 26 Receiv-
ing all the determinations opposed to those of the One as One of the first
hypothesis, the One-being or the "One-Many" (£v rro.A.Aa) of the second
hypothesis 27 will thus be and will become, to itself and to what is other
than itself, equal and superior and inferior in age; it thus will be in time,
as opposed to the One as One: "'So the One partakes of time, if in fact it
partakes of being (µETEXEl µ£v apa XPOVOU, ElITEp KCTl TOU tlvm).'-
'Certainly.'-'Of time advancing (rropt::uoµ£vou TOU xp6vou)?'-'Yes.'-'So
the One always comes to be older than itself, if in fact it goes forward in
step with time'" (152a; PCW, 384). If the One is, it must participate in
time: now, the task will be to show right away that the temporality of the
One is impossible and leads to new contradictions.
Once again it is on the basis of the phenomenon of aging that the Being-
in-time of the One is here determined, as this will be the case each time in
the Parmenides when time is at issue. Thus, the entire problem here comes
to this: what does Plato understand by "aging"? In a first stage we started
with the hypothesis according to which Plato had in view the phenomenon
of aging as an inner-temporal change happening to a thing, and conceived
of it as an oriented change; but, immediately we wondered if what satisfies
the requirements of participation in time, and thus the simultaneity of an
aging and of a rejuvenation, was really a thing that becomes, or if it was not
instead the now that alone can become at the same time older than itself
and younger than itself, while retaining the same age as itsel£ Indeed, of
the now it can be said that it advances, "proceeding from the before to the
after" (152b5; PCW, 384, trans. modified), and in this sense that it ages: for
aging is nothing other than "advancing in age," progressing from the past
toward the future "as time advances." But of this same now, it can also be
very well said that it rejuvenates ceaselessly if this time we no longer con-
sider time according to the scheme of a movement oriented from the before
toward the after, but if we instead think of it as flowing from the future
toward the past: time is then no longer that which "advances" and grows
at each instant from the instant that passed, "snow-balling," according to
Bergson's image, but that which flows from the future toward the past,
according to the image of a river that empties itself and sinks more and
more into the past, to the extent that the past sinks more and more into
itself. 28 If time thus "steps back," "drawing back" so to speak, instead of
advancing, then the now becomes constantly "younger than itself," since
it is renewed and rejuvenated ceaselessly at the point where the present
springs out from the future. At the same time, whatever is the direction of
time, according to whatever directional scheme its movement is to be
conceived, the now that ceaselessly becomes older and younger than itself,

24 • The Metaphysics of Time

has always strictly the same age as itself, since it is constantly and each
time now. That this triple temporal determination-(1) becoming older
than itself; (2) becoming younger than itself; (3) keeping the same age as
itself-is fitting to the One as participant in time only if it is interpreted
as the "now" is what a phenomenological interpretation can bring to light.
Only the now, indeed, can satisfy this triple requirement, and not the
things that come to be in time: for man, for instance, to become older
than himself is never to become younger; if, by contrast, we are speaking
of the now, the contradiction is only apparent. Indeed, what these re-
markably difficult passages are showing is that time can be thought of
according to two inverse directional schemes that henceforward cancel
out one another. The stake of the paradoxes raised by Plato consists in
showing, as a consequence, that time is in no way an oriented change if,
by "oriented change," we must understand every change unfolding ac-
cording to a unique and irreversible direction, from the "before" to the
"next," which are already in themselves temporal determinations. If in fact
every oriented change unfolds in time, time is not itself an oriented
change: such is the conclusion to which Plato wants to lead us. Only the
becoming of an inner-temporal being can be legitimately thought of as
an oriented change-an inner-temporal being that, in aging, sees its
days, its weeks, and its years grow. By thus underscoring this paradox ac-
cording to which time, oriented according to two inverse directions, has
no "direction" at all, as opposed to a becoming or an inner-temporal
change that always unfolds from the "before" toward the "next," because
the anterior determinations of the becoming entity cannot be exchanged
with its ulterior ones, Plato intends to show that time, in itself, is in no way
temporal.
Thus, while the time of the thing, its coming to be from the "before" to
the "next," is a continuous succession of modifications that take place
according to an immutable (directional) sense and consequently can be
thought of as an oriented change, the One that "falls" into time, the now,
"at the same time" (aµa:) rejuvenates and ages, all the while retaining the
same age as itsel£ Time is not in itself oriented; it has absolutely no direc-
tion: this is what results from the Platonic irony, whose triumph is conse-
crated by the reciprocal ruin of these opposed representations of time. Or
rather time can be thought of as having a (directional) sense only if one
confuses it with what is temporal, only if one thinks time itself within the
horizon of inner-temporality. By showing that time, because it can be in-
differently thought of as a "change" according to two inverse directional
schemes, has no "direction" at all, since there is no "direction" for a change
except in time, from the formerly to the next, Plato ironically denounces

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 25

every attempt to think of time itself as flowing in time, by advancing from
the past toward the future, or by flowing, instead, from the future toward
the past.
Indeed, to affirm that time has a "direction" is nothing other than to
maintain either that the past "precedes" the present, because the latter
grows unceasingly from time past while progressing in the direction of the
future, or inversely that the future "precedes" the past to the extent that it
is "not yet" past, but will be "next" (time goes from the future toward the
past by passing through the present). But all "precedence" and all "anteri-
ority," as inner-temporal determinations, have sense precisely only when
we are speaking of that which takes place or happens in time-for exam-
ple, in order to describe the temporality proper to an inner-temporal
change such as "aging": "at first" the man is young, "next" he becomes old.
Now, it is through an unacceptable metabasis that these inner-temporal
determinations are transferred to the horizontal dimensions of time (past,
present, and future), and that time is thought of as a directional change:
the future, as horizon for the appearance of every fact "to come," is neither
"before" the past nor "after" it, neither precedes nor succeeds it, for the
"before" and the "after" can serve only to date inner-temporal events, and
what is more, from the point of view of the past (one can determine the
phases or the moments of a change, for example, only if it is already ac-
complished, by ordering them according to a linear schema, as a sequence
of temporal situations governed by the difference between the before and
t h e a f ter: "fi rst " t h.1s, "a f terward" t h at). By "b erore
/: " an d "next, " one t h us
cannot designate the relation that is established between temporal hori-
zons, but only the relation that is set up in the past tense between the
inner-temporal phases of a change, of a process or of an action that lasts.
The result is that time is not at all a "change" and has none of the features
of a change, being oriented or, again, stretching itself between a "before"
toward a "next. "
But doesn't this interpretation of the Parmenides make Plato say more
things than he actually says? Certainly. The question for us, however, is
whether it can be made consistent with all the passages that this dialogue
devotes to time; it must, then, pass the test of being confronted with the
subsequent passage:

"Do we recall that the older comes to be older than something that
we do. "- "S o, smce
comes to be younger.~" - ""\VT . t he Q ne comes to be
older than itself, wouldn't it come to be older than a self that comes
to be younger?"-"Necessarily."- "Thus it indeed comes to be both
younger and older than itsel£"-"Yes."

26 • The Metaphysics of Time

 "But it is older, isn't it, whenever, in coming to be, it is at the now
time (To vuv), between was and will be (Tov µt::ra~u Tou ~v TE Kat
£crTm)? For as it proceeds from the past [the before] to the future [the
next], it certainly won't jump over (urrt::pB~crETm) the now."-"No, it
won't."-"Doesn't it stop coming to be older when it encounters the
now? It doesn't come to be, but is then already older, isn't it? For if it
were going forward, it could never be grasped by the now. A thing
going forward is able to lay hold of both the now and the later [or
next] (£rr£1Ta)-releasing the now and reaching for the later [or next]
(TOU µ£v vuv acpu~µEvov, TOU 8'£rr£lTCT £m.AaµBav6µt::vov), while com-
ing to be between the two (µt::Ta~u), the later [or next] and the
now."-"True."-"But if nothing that comes to be can sidestep the
now, whenever a thing is at this point, it always stops its coming-
to-be (£rrfox£1 ad TOU y{yvt::cr8m) and then is whatever it may have
come to be." (152a-d; PCW, 384-85, trans. modified)

After having recalled the conditions that the One must satisfy in order
to be in time, Plato proceeds to a systematic destruction of his own hy-
pothesis by putting in relief the contradictions that every conception of the
One-being that conceives of it as plunged into time inevitably falls into.
The entire argument rests here on the notion of µt::Ta~u: middle, intermedi-
ary, interval, the space between. In what sense can the now be defined as
an interval or a middle between the past and the future? Plato, for one, is
content to say, "between was and will be": for, strictly speaking, the now
can be said "to be" only in the present tense-its being cannot be conju-
gated either in the past or in the future tense. Of the now, only one thing
can be said: that it is now. While in the first hypothesis the conditions the
One had to satisfy led us to conceive of time as a change without a stable
substratum, a sort of antilogistic or hetero-logical Heraclitean flux, this
time the now can be the occasion only for a tautological discourse, of the
sort: "the now is now." The now under consideration is the now of Par-
menides, from which all becoming is excluded, since it is present without
remainder: ou8£ rroT' ~v ou8' ECYTCTl £rrd vuv £crnv 6µou mxv, EV, CYUVEXE<;:
"Nor was it [the being] ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, con-
tinuous."29 The critique of the hypothesis of the One participating in time
here rests against arguments of Eleatic origin. It seems that Plato applied
to the One in time the paradoxes of Zeno relative to movement. Indeed,
Zeno showed that movement was unthinkable by relying on a concept of
space as constituted of indivisible parts and thus discontinuous. If move-
ment is divisible in actuality, as Aristotle will say, Achilles will never catch
up with the tortoise, even if he runs twice as fast, because, at the moment

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 27

when he finds himself at the place previously occupied by the tortoise, the
tortoise, who moves half as fast, will yet have traveled a distance equal to
half of that covered by his competitor. In short, Zeno denied the reality of
movement by thinking of the line on which the trajectory unwinds as a
collection of indivisible and contiguous points. Now, Plato seems to take
up here an analogous argument in order to attack not the reality of move-
ment, but rather that of time. If all that comes to be in time could not "avoid
the now," and if the now designates an interval (µt::ra:~u) between past and
future-that is to say, a part of time-then all that passes through the now
must have its becoming "stopped" there, just as Achilles's movement is itself
stopped by the discontinuous character of the Zenonian line. Henceforward
the conclusion of the aporia can only be the following: the now is not a part
or an interval of time, just as the line is not a juxtaposition of points. Neither
is the point a part of the line nor the now a part of time, but only a limit (in
the mathematical sense) in an infinite process of division: this is why, just as
the point is in no place (arorrov), so the now is in no time: this is distinctive
of the £~a:{cpv11c; (the sudden) of the third hypothesis. 30
The passage quoted from the Parmenides thus seems clarified, thanks to
this comparison. And yet, not so! Indeed, the type of interpretation we
have just put forward meets up against an objection of principle: Plato, who
quite often employs the analogy of the line, doesn't do so in this passage in
order to conceive the phenomenon of time. What's the reason? Precisely
because time, as I have tried to establish, is strictly unthinkable in terms of
oriented change. Time, put otherwise, is not in the image ofAchilles's race.
What Plato wants to show, in sum, through the reciprocal ruin of the first
two hypotheses, is that time is in no way thinkable according to the
scheme of an inner-temporal change. This is why the argument of the stop
or the suspension of becoming in the now is Zenonean only in appearance:
we should take it up and deepen its meaning by leaving entirely aside the
perceptual analogies that would allow us to figure time in the form of a
movement of some sort.
What, then, are the sense and the bearing of this argument? Its bearing
is indicated to us in the conclusion that Plato draws from it: since the now
constitutes the stasis of becoming, its stopping point, then in the now the
One does not become at once both older and younger than itself; it is older
and younger than itself: consequently, "the One always both is and comes
to be older and younger than itself" (152e; PCW, 385, modified). This pas-
sage contradicts the text found in 14 lc, upon which I have already com-
mented, and the general sense of which was that becoming cannot be said
in relation to a being, but only with relation to a becoming, to the extent
that the now does not possess outside of itself a second now to which it

28 • The Metaphysics of Time

could be compared, but is always now, insofar as it becomes it endlessly,
and thus can be compared only to itself at a different moment of time: the
becoming is a relation relating to itself, without another comparandum
than itself. 31 While in 14 lc Plato refused to mix the determinations that
issued from Being [l 'etre] with those issued from becoming-"Regarding
a thing in the course of becoming different, it must not have come to be,
be going to be, or be different from what comes to be different; it must
become different, and nothing else" (PCW, 375, modified)-in this pas-
sage, on the contrary, what could be affirmed only of the "becoming older"
is true presently also of the" being older," to the extent that the One, pro-
gressing in time, encounters the now and has its progression "stopped"
there. But what are these dialectical subtleties aiming to explain? In order
to answer this question, it is not enough to do philological exegesis; it is
necessary to correctly orient one's gaze not only on the phenomena that
Plato describes, but on those that, ironically, he does not describe, and
toward which the dialectical contradictions that progressively reveal them-
selves have the task of leading us.
The contradiction that Plato underscores, apropos of the "now" (To vuv),
which is mentioned here for the first time (even if, as I have insisted, it
was already underlying, but in another sense, the developments on time of
the first hypothesis), is that, in the now, becoming is itself in some way
stopped, the "flux" of time frozen and petrified, so that it can't be said of
the One that is in the now that it becomes, but only that it is. On this sub-
ject Damascius will speak of a "suspension" (£rrfoxt::cnc;) of time in the now. 32
The questions that are addressed to the interpreter are the following: (1)
What sort of now did Plato have in view when he defined it as the stasis of
becoming, since every becoming is in itself ek-static, in the sense in which
it is, as we shall see, a "going out" (To EKcrnxv) of itself toward itself, hap-
pening suddenly and, so to speak, "by a leap," as the passages devoted to
the sudden (To £~a{cpvric;, where the prefix £~- is present: "outside of") at-
test? Put otherwise, what differentiates the now (To vuv) that Plato speaks
of here from the sudden to which he will have recourse later in his dialecti-
cal argumentation? (2) Regarding this contradiction between the now and
the becoming and, more generally, this conception of the now as a "stop":
does Plato assume it as his own, or does it rather have an ironic and critical
function, indicating to us how not to think of time, rather than how time
must be conceived? (3) Finally, is the conception that Plato develops here
compatible or not with my interpretation of the preceding passages, ac-
cording to which only the now can satisfy the triple requirement: becom-
ing older than oneself; becoming younger than oneself; retaining the same
age as oneself?

§2. The Paradoxes of the Parmenides • 29

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patience and favour, nor has he encountered any but honourable
opposition; proving how much depends on the manner in which a
man fights his battle, and how much is conceded to courage with
courtesy. Dr. Collins has argued, “Ought Vaccination to be enforced?”
before the Abernethian Society; he has met Dr. W. B. Carpenter in
public debate; he has discussed the Vaccination Disaster at Norwich
in 1882; he has answered Sir Lyon Playfair; and he has brought the
doctrine of evolution to bear on the generation of disease.[297] If
sometimes we refer to the medical profession with severity, the
recollection of members like Dr. Collins operates as a check. Still we
must be just. Professions, like kindred trade unions, are controlled
by their interests, and there never was church, or community, or
corporation which surrendered any source of gain, save by external
compulsion. Public vaccination in England represents a medical
endowment of £100,000 annually, which the profession, true to the
law of its being, cannot renounce voluntarily; and there is no sense
in shutting our eyes to that certainty. Of course, it would be absurd
to charge medical men individually with defending vaccination
because of the gain attached thereto: nothing of the kind is
intended: but as Hobbes observed of mankind in the gross, “Even
the axioms of geometry would be disputed if their interests were
peculiarly affected by them.”
When, therefore, it is said that vaccination is a medical question
which may be left to medical men to settle, the answer is—“Nay:
vaccination is paid for out of the public pocket, and whatever the
evidence adverse to its usefulness, it will be upheld as beneficial by
those who profit by it. If those who pay do not object, those who
are paid never will. In face of common experience, we hold it cannot
be otherwise.”
There are fashions in medicine as in millinery: they are started;
they flourish; they pass away; but the permanence of any medical
fashion might be secured if fortified by endowment. Venesection was
once in vogue; now it is scarcely known; but if in its heyday a law
had been passed for its performance at the public expense, a ring of
official venesectors would have been created to justify the practice
against all gainsayers; to deny or explain away every disaster and
fatality; and at all hazards preserve its credit from reproach; whilst it
would cost something like a constitutional struggle for the nation to
escape from the imposition. It is thus with vaccination. Left to itself,
it would, like venesection, have dropped into disuse; but it acquired
permanence from the initial error—the endowment of the National
Vaccine Establishment in 1808.
The enforcement of vaccination supplies a yet stronger reason for
public interference. A church endowed by the State might be
endured by Dissenters, but if submission to any of its offices were
made compulsory, endurance would give place to active resistance.
Such is the case with vaccination. As it is endowed and enforced, it
is hopeless to try to reserve it from general discussion and
denunciation. Since citizens are liable to fine and imprisonment who
withhold their children from the lancet, it becomes their duty to
satisfy themselves as to the character of the operation for which
they are taxed, and with which their families are menaced; and
should their convictions be adverse to its utility and safety, they
cannot do their fellow-citizens better service than by bearing the
testimony of open resistance.
Thus vaccination is translated to politics and made every man’s
business; whilst the interest created by its endowment and
enforcement deprives its medical advocates of judicial authority in
the controversy. It would be as reasonable to expect slaveholders to
denounce slavery, or protected manufacturers to advocate free trade
as for those whose professional prestige and advantage are involved
in the practice to speak the truth about vaccination. Let us be
reasonable. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? We
should not require of average human nature the virtue of its rarer
forms. Like all monopolies, vaccination endowed and enforced, is
defended with unanimity from within, and must be attacked and
overthrown from without—nevertheless be it said with some
assistance from within, and that assistance most efficient.
 It is therefore no cause for surprise that a large share in the
agitation against compulsory vaccination has fallen to laymen. Mr.
George S. Gibbs (cousin of John Gibbs and brother of R. B. Gibbs)
has for thirty years maintained a criticism, chiefly statistical, of the
official defences of vaccination, characterised throughout by an
accuracy which has never been impugned.[298]
Mr. H. D. Dudgeon has been described as “a veritable and
venerable apostle of health.” With a consummate knowledge of
hygiene, and a profound faith in its power to overcome zymotic
disease, he has set forth its principles with such lucidity and
persistency that he has gone far to educate Leicester in setting at
naught the vaccine superstition. To the standard assertion of the
vaccinators, that sanitation is good against all febrile affections,
except smallpox, for which there is no preventive save vaccination
(the sovereign variety being conveniently undefined) he has been an
opponent merciless as truth. Regret is frequently expressed that the
abundant information and admirable sense which pervade Mr.
Dudgeon’s writing have been confined to newspapers and occasional
pamphlets, but it is probable his teaching has been all the more
fruitful because adapted to immediate circumstances.[299] The word
spoken in due season how good it is!
The name of Mr. Alexander Wheeler of Darlington is familiar
wherever vaccination is brought under discussion. Mr. Wheeler’s
interest in the subject was first excited, he writes, by Mr. G. S. Gibbs,
“whose scepticism as to its virtue seemed to me absurd”—
Mr. Gibbs inquired whether I had examined the question, and when I
confessed that I had not, he asked if I would read Baron’s Life of Dr.
Jenner. Nothing loath, I accepted the loan of the volumes. Doubts began
to trouble me with the first volume, and the second quite upset my
confidence in Vaccination as a positive preventive of Smallpox. I then set
to work to ascertain with what care I could, whether there was any truth
in the assertion that Vaccination diminished Smallpox or modified its
virulence. The process of determination was not rapid, but long before I
had formed a definite opinion, I was satisfied that Compulsory Vaccination
was indefensible; and my first efforts were directed to the protection of
my own children from the infliction. Unsatisfied as to what Vaccination
 was, or what the Vaccinator effected, I clearly saw that the State had no
right to enforce a practice by no means harmless, nor preventive of
Smallpox, nor easy to explain the use of.

As lecturer, debater and newspaper controversialist, Mr. Wheeler

has acquired well-earned distinction. Knowing far more of
vaccination, its history, varieties, consequences, and statistics than
his adversaries, they are usually overthrown with a dexterity realised
as horrible and astonishing. Like savages with bows and arrows,
they come forth in the innocence of faith to encounter arms of
precision. In 1878 Mr. Wheeler held a debate with Dr. George Wyld,
an enthusiastic advocate of the cowpox discarded by Jenner as
impotent against smallpox. Sir Thomas Chambers presided, and the
question discussed being, “Is Vaccination worthy of National
Support?” How rash and how futile was Dr. Wyld’s championship is
recorded in the report of the debate.[300]
Mr. William Tebb is another well-known name in connection with
the movement against vaccination. For a time dubious, his attention
was quickened and his course decided by the summons of the St.
Pancras guardians to have his daughter, Beatrice, vaccinated. His
refusal was followed by prosecution after prosecution in the
Marylebone police-court, until at last the guardians gave up the
contest as hopeless.[301] It was a bad day for vaccination when the
compulsory law was applied to Mr. Tebb. As with many others,
persecution made of him an inflexible and active antagonist. His
tongue, his pen, and his purse, coupled with untiring industry and
eminent executive ability, have been devoted to the exposure and
overthrow of the conjoint superstition and tyranny. Mr. Tebb is a fine
exemplification of Sir T. Fowell Buxton’s opinion, “Vigour, energy,
resolution, firmness of purpose—these carry the day. Is there one
whom difficulties dishearten, who bends to the storm? He will do
little. Is there one who will conquer? That kind of man never fails:”
adding, “The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great
difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, is
energy—invincible determination, a purpose once fixed, and then
death or victory. That quality will do anything that can he done in
this world.”[302]
Mr. P. A. Taylor’s speeches in the House of Commons have been
widely read, but his Letter to Dr. W. B. Carpenter has been, perhaps,
the most effective contribution to the good cause.[303] Dr. Carpenter
had volunteered for the defence of vaccination, and had challenged
Mr. Taylor; and being of a credulous and uncritical habit of mind, he
collected and recited the various legends and factitious statistics that
form the body of vaccination, with additions from his private
resources; thus constituting himself an objective of attack, and
providing Mr. Taylor with an excellent opportunity. Mr. Taylor
accepted the challenge: he captured and destroyed Dr. Carpenter’s
positions seriatim, leaving him routed and helpless. The Letter has
had an immense circulation, and its influence on public opinion is
manifesting itself in a thousand ways. Neither Dr. Carpenter nor any
vaccinator has ventured to reply to Mr. Taylor; the fact being that no
reply is possible. Any one who attentively reads Mr. Taylor’s Letter
cannot fail to perceive that the practice represented by Dr. Carpenter
is rooted in illusion and imposture. Silence under the circumstances
may therefore pass for discretion: silence on Dr. Carpenter’s part
possesses a significance it would be difficult to misinterpret. Indeed,
none know better than those responsible for vaccination as a
medical interest, that the less it is brought under discussion the
more likely it is to endure. Quieta non movere is their motto; and
officious champions like Dr. Carpenter have little thanks for their
restlessness.
Correspondence in newspapers is a well-recognised means for the
diffusion of new ideas, and in the use of this means the opponents
of vaccination have acquired no little distinction. There is an
increasing number throughout the country who not only know their
own case, but the case of their adversaries better than do their
adversaries themselves; and if an editor has grace enough to
maintain a fair field and show no favour, the issue is invariably
satisfactory. Two able correspondents, who have gone hence, are
especially worthy of mention—Andrew Leighton and William Gibson
Ward. Mr. Leighton was a Liverpool merchant, who, having become
interested in the vaccination question, made its discussion the
occupation of his leisure. With a clear and logical mind, patient,
sagacious, and tolerant, prejudice itself could scarcely withstand his
sweet reasonableness. Almost to the day of his death, 14th January,
1877, he was engaged in newspaper controversy, each letter bearing
witness to his admirable temper and persuasive power.[304] Mr. Ward
of Perriston Towers was a man of wide reading and perfervid
character, who wrote and talked after the manner of Cobbett, whom
in many respects he resembled. Having discovered the truth as
concerned vaccination, he applied himself vigorously and
successfully to its diffusion. He sustained his prosecution as a parent
with the joy of one who delights in battle; and, indeed, as it was
said, a periodical prosecution would have suited him exactly,
providing him with occasion for a rousing speech in court and a
discussion with the bench, to be duly reported in the Herefordshire
newspapers. Mr. Ward died 18th October, 1882. Latterly he had
access to The Times, and followed up a series of letters on subjects
he had made his own with one on which he argued, that smallpox
was neither an unmixed evil, nor a cause of extra mortality.[305]
To enter into a closer enumeration of those engaged in the
movement against vaccination would be invidious and bound to
imperfection. Still it would be grateful to refer to the various services
of veterans like Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise, Mr. Thomas Baker, Dr.
Edward Haughton, Mr. T. B. Brett of St. Leonards, Mr. Edmund
Proctor of Newcastle, Mr. John Lucas of Gateshead, Mr. R. A. Milner
of Keighley, Mr. W. F. Fox of Dewsbury, Dr. E. J. Crow of Ripon, Mr.
Francis Davis, jun., of Enniscorthy, Mr. Wm. Thurlow of Sudbury, Mr.
Wm. Adair of Maryport, Mr. Charles Gillett of Banbury, Dr. T. L.
Nichols, Mr. James Burns, and Mr. Amos Booth of Leicester. These
and others have borne the odium of despised truth, and live to see it
steadily acquiring favour and force, whilst the delusion to which it is
opposed is entering the region of scepticism preparatory to
dispersion and contempt.
 All means are good against evil, but deeds are more than words;
and talk against vaccination counts far less than resistance to its
infliction. The more who are withheld from the rite, the more live to
prove its inutility; and the more the law designed to enforce is set at
defiance, the surer and sooner will be its overthrow. Nevertheless,
let us not forget what this warfare costs, nor how we are indebted to
the men and women, brave, tender, and true, by whom it is
endured. As a rule, the rich are exempt: the contest is with the poor.
As Mrs. Jacob Bright says—
I object to Compulsory Vaccination because it is an outrageous piece of
class legislation. No one in easy circumstances, no one possessing the
luxury of a family doctor, need have his child vaccinated. He has only to
tell his family doctor that he objects to Vaccination, and the matter is at
an end. Did ever any one hear of a family doctor who threatened to
prosecute the head of a family for nonconformity in this respect? I think
not. But the family doctor of the poor is the parish doctor. He is quite
independent of his patient, and being paid by other people to vaccinate
them, he not only vaccinates them in many cases against their will, but he
does it when he likes, and with what virus he likes, irrespective of the
feelings or opinions they may entertain.
I was riding some time ago in Sherwood Forest, and stopped to ask for
a glass of water at a cottage, where a poor woman was standing with her
fat little baby in her arms. I said, “You’ve got a pretty boy there. Has he
been vaccinated?” The mother’s face, which was glowing with pride at
praise of her boy, suddenly fell, and she said, “No, madam, he hasn’t, but
he’ll have to be. We’ve lost one through it,” she added, with tears in her
eyes. She is one of a great number of poor people who, rightly or wrongly,
believe that Vaccination is dangerous, and yet are not able to resist the
pressure put upon them to vaccinate; they are too poor, and in most cases
have not the spirit to resist.
I say that it is disgraceful to fine and imprison people for forming an
independent opinion on a medical question; and it is particularly
disgraceful that my poor neighbour should be thus persecuted when I am
free, absolutely free, to please myself whether my children shall be
vaccinated. It is not possible that this thing can continue. [306]

The contest, be it repeated, is with the poor. “There is no getting

over the fact,” says Dr. John Scott of Manchester, “that vaccination is
hated among the working class, in Lancashire, at least.” Vaccination
is hated, and rightly hated, and the law is set to overcome that
hatred. Multitudes submit because they either know not how, or
dread to do otherwise; but an honourable and increasing number
prefer the better part—holding by what they recognise for right,
resolved to obey God rather than man. It has been said, “The days
of martyrdom, like those of miracles, have ceased”; but have they?
The record of humble English folk, who, during the past thirty years,
have withstood the infamous Vaccination Acts, bears witness to the
contrary. Martyrdom and heroism are rarely recognised by those who
occasion or dislike their manifestation: it is sympathy that opens the
eyes to their appearance. Unknown or despised, these medical
nonconformists have stood true to their faith in the order of nature
against doctor-craft, and have counted nothing dear to them if so be
they could preserve their children and conscience from outrage.
They have been prosecuted with all the malice and pertinacity of
petty authority—of Justice Shallow and Bumble; have been insulted
from the judgment seat; have been fined to the uttermost farthing
and loaded with uttermost costs, and this repeatedly; have had their
goods and furniture distrained, and their homes broken up; have
been sent to jail with hard labour, and subjected to every indignity
and cruelty of the prison-house; have been hunted from parish to
parish, and in despair driven to exile. And these have been
Englishmen, the law English, and the time our own! The Master of
the Rolls recently observed, “What is contrary to the feelings of
every honest man cannot be the law of England—or, if it be, the
sooner it ceases to be law the better.” It would be unfair to charge
the injustice of the Vaccination Acts to the English people. To most
of them their character and operation are unknown. The chief
sufferers are hidden under the hatches of poverty, and are unable to
make the land resound with their wrongs. Those, too, who essay to
speak for them are confronted with that obdurate dulness with
which the early Free-Traders had to contend when restriction was
thought to be as good for commerce as cowpox is thought to be
good for health in stopping smallpox. Mr. Bright, in praising the
speeches of Mr. Villiers at Birmingham, 29th January, 1884,
remarked—
 I mention their publication to revive the strange and painful fact that
during the years when those speeches—so convincing, so absolutely
unanswerable, were spoken in the House of Commons, they were
addressed, as it were, to men morally stone deaf. The arguments were not
answered, the facts adduced were not disproved, the appalling suffering
of the people was not denied.

A similar deafness to the oppression of compulsory vaccination

prevails, though there are signs of awakening. Still it is not for those
who suffer to wait on politicians. The words are trite, but true as
trite—
“Know ye not,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”
Many are discovering that in union is strength. Combinations for
mutual protection and insurance against penalties are multiplying.
Resist and Organise is their watchword: organise, study the law, find
out its weak places, make the most of them, harass its
administrators, vote only for guardians who are opposed to
compulsion; and, in short, do whatever is possible to frustrate the
pernicious legislation.
Sometimes it is asked, “Why not obey the law and agitate for its
repeal?” but the suggestion is designed for stultification. Suppose
the Society of Friends had consented to take oaths until the law was
adjusted to their consciences, would they not have been swearing to
this day? Suppose some dissenters had not refused to pay church
rates, when would church rates have been abolished? Suppose the
Irish had submitted to English rule until convinced by reason of the
wickedness and folly of their domination, how long would they have
had to wait for the redress of their wrongs? Such questions might be
run over pages, but to what purpose? All know (unless submerged in
cant) that those who would have must take; and that no man’s
rights can be entrusted to another’s good-will, be the trustee ever so
just. Vaccination is a medical monopoly established, endowed, and
enforced—a tyranny to be overthrown. Those who profit by it will
never consent to its surrender, whatever the evidence of its inutility
and mischief: it would be against experience to expect otherwise:
and they will never be so valiant in defence of their monopoly, and
so profuse in the assertion of its overwhelming advantages, as when
its dissolution is imminent. The wise understand these things. There
is, therefore, but one way in which to get rid of the incubus, and
that way is outright resistance. Already such resistance has proved
successful in several parts of the country. The law has been reduced
to abeyance, and similar resistance will be rewarded with similar
results. Moreover, further legislation in favour of vaccination has
been checked. Parliament will pass no more Vaccination Acts. The
plague thus far is stayed: the worst possible has been seen: the
business is to clear away what remains.

It is sometimes said that vaccination is unnatural, and the saying

is disregarded as unscientific or absurd. But is it unscientific? and is
it absurd? Men deserve an order in Nature, and when they perceive
that any procedure is at variance with that order, they instinctively
condemn it as unnatural, though possibly they may be unable to
give a philosophic account of their aversion.
We unite in the assertion that vaccination is unnatural, and when
we are asked, Why? we answer, Because it is an operation which
violates the order maintained in the formation of the blood. If we
follow food into the stomach and attend to the processes of
digestion, rejection, and assimilation—the infinite care, in short, with
which blood is made, we shall start back with dislike, and even
horror, from a practice which sets at naught all this care; which
attacks the blood directly, and attacks it to poison it. Hence it is that
vaccination is stigmatised as unnatural, being a process which not
only reverses the course of Nature in blood-making, but doubly
unnatural, as violating that course and poisoning its product.
To re-affirm and illustrate our meaning, we take the following
piece of physiological poetry, poetic yet scientifically accurate, from
Dr. Garth Wilkinson—
 In the human body, whatever enters the blood, be it even the most
bland food, the juice of the grape or the pomegranate, or the fine flour of
wheat, be it oil, wine, or fig, is broken up first, and then led inwards
through long avenues of introduction. The most innocent food goes in
most easily and first. The police and surveillance for the rest are
exceeding great and many. The senses electively appetise the fine food; it
has to pass through their peremptory doors of liking and disliking;
instructed doors of memory, association, imagination, reason, wisdom,
religion, in adults. It is then attacked by digestive salivas, tests,
examinations, and severe juices, and questioned to the uttermost in that
degree, which corresponds to the former. It is strained through organ
after organ; each a tribunal of more than social exactitude. It is absorbed
by the finest systems of choice in pore and vessel, organic judgment
sitting in every corner, and presiding over each inner doorway. It is
submitted to glandular and lung purifications, and their furnaces of trials
and eliminations. At last it is weighed in the balances, and minted by
supreme nerve wisdoms; and only after all these processes is it admitted
into the golden blood. This of the best food, such as good and wise men
eat. The worst food is made the best of by a constant passage through
bodily mercies and mitigations—a no less sedulous though a penal
process. This is physiology, and divine-human decency, and like a man’s
life. Vaccination traverses and tramples upon all these safeguards and
wisdoms; it goes direct to the blood, or, still worse, to the lymph, and not
with food; it puts poison, introduced by puncture, and that has no test
applicable to it, and can have no character given to it but that it is fivefold
animal and human poison, at a blow into the very centre, thus otherwise
guarded by nature in the providence of God. This is blood assassination,
and like a murderer’s life. [307]

Finally, vaccination is an attempt to swindle Nature. The vaccinator

says, “Come, my little dear, come and let me give you a disease
wherewith I shall so hoax Nature that henceforth you may live in
what stench you please, and smallpox shall not catch you.” But can
Nature be swindled? can Nature be hoaxed? Mr. Lowell, in praising
the genius of Cervantes, says, “There is a moral in Don Quixote, and
a very profound one it is—that whoever quarrels with Nature,
whether wittingly or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it.”
There is sometimes an apparent triumph over Nature. We do wrong,
and fancy we may evade the penalty by some cunning contrivance,
but ere long we perceive with dismay that the consequences were
only concealed or staved off, and that we have to answer to the
uttermost farthing. Vaccination is a dodge kindred with incantations
and similar performances whereby it is hoped to circumvent the
order of the Highest, and compel his favour apart from obedience to
his will. By artifice it is attempted to obviate a consequence of ill-
living, whilst persisting in ill-living; but if it were possible to escape
smallpox by such means, we should have equal punishment in some
other mode. No: smallpox with its alternatives and equivalents can
only be avoided through compliance with the old-fashioned
prescription, “Wash you, make you clean; cease to do evil, learn to
do well.” The lesson is hard to learn, and harder to practise; but
there is no evading it if we would be healthy and happy. Wherefore
all tricks like vaccination are bound to nullity and disaster. As Hosea
Biglow says—
“You hev gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.”

WILLIAM A. GUY, F.R.C.P., F.R.S.

Is Vaccination a preventive of Smallpox? To this question there is, there
can be, no answer except such as is couched in the language of figures.—
Journal of the Statistical Society, 1882, vol. xlv. p. 414.
G. F. KOLB,
Member of the Royal Statistical Commission of Bavaria.
From childhood I had been trained to look upon Cowpox as an absolute
protective from Smallpox. I believed in Vaccination more strongly than in
any ecclesiastical dogma. Numerous and acknowledged failures did not
shake my faith. I attributed them either to the carelessness of the
operator or the badness of the lymph.
In course of time the question of Compulsory Vaccination came before
the Reichstag, when a medical friend supplied me with a mass of statistics
in favour of Vaccination, in his opinion, conclusive and unanswerable. This
awoke the statistician within me. On inspection, I found the figures
delusive; and closer examination left no shadow of doubt in my mind that
the statistical array of proof represented a complete failure.
My investigations were continued, and my judgment was confirmed. For
instance, Cowpox was introduced to Bavaria in 1807, and for a long time
none, except the newly-born, escaped Vaccination; nevertheless in the
epidemic of 1871, of 30,472 cases of Smallpox, no less than 29,429 were
vaccinated, as is shown in the documents of the State.— From Letter to
M r . W illiam T ebb , 22nd January, 1882 .
 FOOTNOTES:
[293] The Statistics of the Medical Officers to the Leeds Smallpox
Hospital Exposed and Refuted in a Letter to the Leeds Board of
Guardians. By John Pickering. Leeds, 1876.
[294] Mr. Constable’s publications have been as follows—
Medical Evidence in the Case of Dale v. Constable. York, 1872. Pp.
30.
Doctors, Vaccination, and Utilitarianism. York, 1873. Pp. 239.
Our Medicine Men: a Few Hints. Hull, 1876. Pp. 689.
Fashions of the Day in Medicine and Science. Hull, 1879. Pp. 300.
[295] Vaccination Tracts with Preface and Supplement. London,
1879. Pp. 348.
[296] Can Disease protect Health? being a Reply to Mr. Ernest
Hart’s pamphlet, entitled The Truth about Vaccination. By Enoch
Robinson, M.R.C.S. London, 1880. Pp. 38.
[297] A Review of the Norwich Vaccination Inquiry. London, 1883.
Sir Lyon Playfair’s Logic. London, 1883. Specificity and Evolution
in Disease. By W. J. Collins, M.D., B.S., B.Sc. (Lond.) London,
1884.
[298] The first publication of Mr. Gibbs, The Evils of Vaccination,
is dated 1856: the latest is a reply to the question, “Is Vaccination
Scientific?” in The Journal of Science, March, 1884.
[299] An article, “Compulsory Vaccination,” in evidence of Mr.
Dudgeon’s quality, will be found in The Westminster Review, No.
CXXX., April, 1884.
[300] Vaccination: Is it Worthy of National Support? A Public
Discussion in South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on 28th May, 1878,
under the Presidency of Sir Thomas Chambers, M.P., Recorder of
the City of London. London, 1878.
Mr. Wheeler has published the following pamphlets—
Vaccination in the Light of History. London, 1878.
Vaccination—Opposed to Science and a Disgrace to English Law.
London, 1879.
Vaccination—1883. London, 1884.
[301] Government Prosecutions for Medical Heresy; a Verbatim
Report of the case Regina v. Tebb. Dedicated to the Board of St.
Pancras Guardians. With an Introduction and Appendix of
Illustrative Matter. London, 1879.
[302] Mr. Tebb’s publications have been many, and his last is
especially noteworthy—Compulsory Vaccination in England: with
Incidental References to Foreign States. London, 1884. Pp. 64.
[303] Vaccination. A Letter to Dr. W. B. Carpenter, C.B. By P. A.
Taylor, M.P. London, 1881.
[304] Mr. Leighton published nothing outside the newspapers
except a letter addressed to William Chambers of Edinburgh,
entitled, The People of Dewsbury and Vaccination. London, 1876.
[305] “A New View of Smallpox.”—The Times, 25th December,
1879.
[306] Letter from Ursula M. Bright to Annual Meeting of the
London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, held
in Shoreditch Town Hall, 13th May, 1884.
[307] On Human Science, Good and Evil, and its Works; and on
Divine Revelation and its Works and Sciences. London, 1876.
 INDEX.

Abbott, Mr., speaker, House of Commons, 219.

Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, 396.

Aberdeen degrees, 330.

Aberdeenshire, Maitland at home, 34.

Acksell, Dr., 408.

Adair, William, 590.

Adams, Dr., Waltham, uses smallpox cowpox, 76.

Adams, Dr., pearly pox for variolation, 120;

on cowpox before Jenner, 138.

Adams, American president, 379.

Adderley, Sir Charles, 553.

Addington, Mr., 186, 195.

Addington, John, surgeon, 189, 218.

Addison, W. J., evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 556.

Alexander, Emperor of Russia, cautioned by Jenner against Walker, 329;

disappoints Jenner, 362;
enforces vaccination, 406.
Allen v. Worthy, 551.

Alsop, Mr., surgeon, Calne, 130.

Amelia, Princess, variolated, 18, 22.

Anderson, Mr., Madras, fraud, 387.

Anderson, Dr., Leith, 151.

Angerstein, Mr., 230.

Antimony, tartarated, substitute for cowpox, 121, 348.

Anti-Vaccination Congresses—Paris 1880, Cologne 1881, Berne 1883, 581.

Anti-Vaccinator, Henry Pitman’s, 544;

John Pickering’s, 574.

Anti-Vaccinators, characterised by Robert Lowe, 528;

by Simon, 558-59;
by Marson, 563;
by Seaton, 569;
by British Medical Association, 580;
by J. G. Talbot, M. P., and by Dr. Barrow, 581.

Aspinwall, Dr., variolator, Boston, 376, 377.

Atheism imputed to variolators, 42.

Austria, death-rates compared with those of England, 506.

Avelin, Professor, vaccination in Prussia, 405.

Ayrton, A. S., vaccinators should be subject to penalties, 532.

Badcock, Mr., Brighton, produces and uses smallpox cowpox, 75, 272, 472, 512,
514.

Bagehot, Walter, 8.

Baillie, Dr., witness for Jenner, 190.

Baker, Sir George, practice of the Suttons, 47.

Baker, John, one of Jenner’s victims, 117, 154.

Baker, Thomas, 509, 590;

evidence House of Commons’ committee 1871, 555.

Bakewell, Dr. R. H., evidence House of Commons’ committee 1871, 559-560.

Ballard, Dr., prize Essay on Vaccination, 547, 548.

Balmis, Dr. F. X., expedition as trader and vaccinator, 401.

Banks, Mr., Jenner’s claims, 195, 233.

Banks, Sir Joseph, 146, 147, 226.

Baptism conjoined with vaccination, 276.

Barbados, variolation, 38.

Barge, Mary and John, 104, 119.

Baron’s Life of Jenner, 349-363, 586.

Baron, Dr. John, romance as to Jenner’s early years, 94;

extra-ordinary narrative, 95;
gush over George IV., 220;
Jenner v. Walker, 226;
Jenner’s shyness, 230;
letter from Jenner on Grosvenor case, 319;
first meeting with Jenner and attitude toward him, 349, 352;
appalled by no inconsistency, 354;
nor admitted change of mind in Jenner, 355-356;
rant over Balmis expedition, 402;
Jenner’s inability to count, 416;
Dr. Watt’s mischievousness, 452.
Uses and sends Jenner equine virus, 269;
apology for confounding horsegrease with horsepox, 270.

Barrow, Dr., “a disgrace to humanity,” 581.

Barrow, Mr., 538.

Barttelot, Colonel, 537.

Bath Vaccine Pock Institution, 163.

Bathurst, Lord, servant variolated and died, 34.

Batts of Temple variolated, 19.

Bavaria, results of vaccination, 596.

Beale, Dr. Lionel, much vaccinated, 302.

Beaufort, Duke of, 176.

Beddoes, Dr., cowpox, 138;

smallpox after cowpox, 165.

Bedford, Duke of, 219, 220.

Bengal subscription to Jenner, 390.

Berkeley, Jenner’s birthplace and home, 92;

inhabitants variolated, 99.

Berkeley, Admiral, 186, 194.

Berkeley, Earl of, 176, 191.

Berlin Royal Vaccine Institution, and Jennerian feast, 405.

Berne Anti-Vaccination Congress, 1883, 581.

Birch, John, variolation harmless, 66;

treatment of smallpox a chief cause of fatalities, 85;
summoned on Jenner’s case, 187;
character of his opposition to vaccination, 274;
scorn for means used to extend craze, 276;
nature of evidence submitted to House of Commons, 276;
desire to know what cowpox was, 277;
absurdity of spurious cowpox, 277;
what had Jenner discovered? 278;
 assertion that cowpox was harmless and would never prove fatal, 279;
futility of variolous test, 279;
smallpox following vaccination, 280;
Jenner pestered with failures, 280;
fine promises belied, 281;
death and epitaph, 281, 282;
Jenner’s treatment of Birch, 283;
mention in Edinburgh Review, 290.

Birch, Penelope, reprints brother’s papers, 281,

and erects his monument, 282.

Blandford fire and smallpox, 85.

Blane, Sir Gilbert, 83, 397;

witness for Jenner, 187;
estimate of smallpox for United Kingdom, 208, 209.

Bleeding, 519, 584.

Blistering, 519.

Blood-making, process described, 594-595.

Bombay, vaccination introduced, 385, 388;

subscription to Jenner, 390.

Bompas, flaming fire-brand, 77.

Booth, Amos, 590.

Boringdon, Lord, bill to suppress variolation, 73, 353.

Boston, variolation first practised, 2-4, 7, 377;

completely variolated, 57;
method of practice, 58, 373;
smallpox in 18th century, 371-373.

Bouley, Prof., experiments with horsepox, 273.

Bourne, Sturges, denounces variolation, 72, 246.

Boy, cowpox ox-faced, 297.

Boylston, Dr. Zabdiel, variolation in New England, 2, 5-7, 56, 371.

Bowman, Mr., Newcastle, 550.

Bradley, Dr., Jenner’s conjectural income, 188.

Brady, Mr., liberal pay for vaccination, 536.

Bragge, Mr., surgeon, attempts use of cowpox, 138.

Brahmins hold cowpox impure, 387.

Bread, Beef and Beer, 88, 316.

Bremer, Dr., vaccinations in Berlin, 406.

Brett, T. B., St. Leonards, 590.

Bridgewater, Duke of, son variolated and killed, 34.

Bright, Jacob, 553;

cites Gregory against Marson on marks, 561.

Bright, John, deafness of House of Commons, 592.

Bright, Ursula M., forcible vaccination of poor, 590.

British Medical Journal, refusal of advertisements, 582.

British Medical Association on anti-vaccinators, 579-580.

Brodie, Sir Benjamin, medical practice, 92.

Brotherton, Joseph, 501.

Brown, Thomas, Musselburgh, criticism of vaccination, 285;

sees vaccinated with smallpox, 286;
fallacy of variolous test, 287;
attempted refutation by Edinburgh vaccinators, 287;
re-affirmed position in 1842, 288;
Jenner’s malice toward, 351;
Moore’s insolence, 457;
 confession that Brown was in the right, 458;
cited by Hamernik against re-vaccination, 520.

Browne, Hawkins, 246.

Bruce, H. A., spokesman for vaccination ring, 530-531;

untruthful statement, 537-538.

Bryce’s Test, 353.

Buchan, Dr. William, Domestic Medicine, 53;

recommends variolation, 54;
appeal to clergy, 54;
mortality from smallpox and variolation, 66;
maltreatment of smallpox, 85;
prevalence and cause of scurvy, 87-88;
denounces tea, 90.

Bullpox, 144, 272, 374.

Burdett, Sir Francis, scepticism as to vaccination, 253.

Burnet, Mr., prosecuted for variolation, 463.

Burns, James, 590.

Burrows, Dr., London bills of mortality, 1818, 77.

Burrows, Sir J. Cordy, production of smallpox cowpox, 76.

Butler, Bishop, national insanities, 91.

Buxton, Sir T. Fowell, 587.

“Buying the smallpox,” 29.

Byng, Lady, two children variolated, 21.

Calcraft, Miss, Jenner on Grosvenor case, 320.

Calcutta Gazette, 1804, 383.

Cameron, Dr., smallpox cowpox, 273.

Candlish, John, 565, 567, 577;

repeated prosecutions, 550-552;
witness before House of Commons’ committee 1871, 553.

Canning, George, declaration as to compulsory vaccination, 254, 310, 476, 480,

485.

Canterbury, Archbishop of, would not commit Church, 275.

Carioli, syphilis invaccinated, 523.

Carlyle, stupidity, 19;

teeth outwards, 215;
swarmery, 291, 292;
injustice by law, 548.

Caroline, Princess of Wales, has six felons variolated, 14;

six charity children, 17;
her own children, 18, 22;
promoter of Maitland’s experiments, 171.

Carpenter, Dr. W. B., answered by Dr. Collins, 583,

and by P. A. Taylor, 588.

Carter, R. Brudenell, invaccination of syphilis, 310.

Catharine, Empress of Russia, variolated, 62, 362, 514;

payment to Dimsdale, 64.

Catpox, 170.

Caution against Vaccine Swindlers, 326.

Ceely of Aylesbury generates smallpox cowpox, 75, 272, 472, 514, 528.

Cervantes, 595.

Ceylon, variolation and vaccination, 345;

smallpox, 392-393; 408.

Chadwick, Edwin, “Keep your eye on the death-rate,” 450.

Chambers, Sir Thomas, denies that smallpox increases mortality, 439;
his prophecy, 538;
Wheeler and Wyld debate, 586.

Chambers, Wm., Andrew Leighton’s letter to, 589.

Chapman, Mrs., variolator, 44.

Charlotte, Queen, 171, 219, 221, 370, 380.

Chastellux, 59.

Chavasse, Dr., ravages of smallpox, 77.

Chemists and apothecaries friends of smallpox, 325.

Chester smallpox in 18th century, 69.

Cheyne, Dr. George, prevalence of scurvy, 87-88.

Chickenpox, alias smallpox, 366-367.

China, vaccination introduced, 386, 393.

Chinese method of variolation, 16, 394.

Chincough, Watt’s treatise, 439.

Christ’s Hospital, smallpox from, 15;

mortality of smallpox among inmates, 23, 32, 524.

Christie, Dr. Thomas, Ceylon, 392.

Chiswell, Sarah, 8, 10.

Cholera, 1831-32, 448.

Church-rates, compulsory, 542, 560, 593.

Clarence, Duke of, (William IV.) 171, 191, 219.

Clarke, Dr., advocates compulsory vaccination, 305.

Cline, Henry, letter describing first vaccination, 128;
advises Jenner to come to London, 129;
witness for Jenner, 189;
apology for Walker, 227;
National Vaccine Establishment, 459.

Cobbett, William, shuffles of quackery, 20;

in Gray’s Inn, 81;
denounces potatoes and tea, 89-90, 316;
power in common sense, 304;
vaccination fury, 305;
addresses Wilberforce on compulsion, 305;
endowment of vaccination, 307, 311;
its proved failure, 308;
spurious cowpox dodge, 309;
foresees invaccination of syphilis, 309, 531;
Advice to Young Men, 312;
smallpox-made-milder dodge, 313;
had Cobbett followed Jenner, 314;
children variolated, 315;
sanitary science undiscovered, 316;
honourable prejudices, 317.

Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice, unvaccinated infants, 77;

repeated prosecutions, 551.

Cockermouth and Dr. Walker, 220, 325.

Codd, Philip, son vaccinated by Jenner takes smallpox, 312.

Cole, James, infected with horsegrease, 115.

Collins, William, painter, 448.

Collins, Dr. W. J., opponent of vaccination, 543, 547;

evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 554.

Collins, Dr. W. J., 583.

Colchester, itch and vaccination in 85th Regiment, 126, 277.

Coldbath Fields Smallpox Hospital, 40.

Colliander, Dr., Swedes decline variolation, 408.

Cologne Anti-Vaccination Congress, 1881, 581.

Combe, Andrew, 427.

Combes, The, 449.

Common-sense defined, 303.

Condamine, La, 59.

Coningham, William, 529.

Connah, Mr., Seaford, rarity of smallpox, 83.

Connell, Ira, 545.

Constable, H. Strickland, writings, 581.

Constantinople, practice of variolation, 1, 8, 11, 12, 18.

Convulsions, enormous death-rate in London, 80.

Cook, Turkey merchant, 15.

Cook, Captain, and Jenner, 92.

Cooke, C., cowpox did not prevent smallpox, 165.

Copenhagen, smallpox and vaccination, 420.

Copland, Dr., scepticism as to vaccination, 478.

Corfield, Dr., “the falsest of falsehoods,” 86.

Cornwallis, Marquis, 398.

Corrigan, Sir Dominic, evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 560-561,

567.

Corry, Mr., withdraws 1866 vaccination bill, 532.

Cortez, Mexican smallpox, 511.

Corvisart and Jenner, 400.

Cother, Mr., variolates Jenner’s child, 357;

resulting scandal, 358.

Cough, Whooping, Newcastle, 429, 430;

Glasgow, 439-443;
England and Wales 1838-40, 505.

Courtney, Mr., amazing estimate, 194.

Covent Garden grave-yard, 82.

Covington, F., evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 555.

Cowper, William, 80, 576.

Cowper, W. F., 496;

operates in House of Commons for Epidemiological Society, 497;
extreme docility, 498;
answer to Mr. Duncombe, 499;
simple-minded defence of compulsion, 500.

Cowpox, Jenner’s cases in Inquiry, 104-108;

assures absolute security from smallpox unaffected by time, 105, 121, 141;
incommunicable to those who have had smallpox, 106;
taken repeatedly, 107, 108, 141;
action in conjunction with smallpox, 150;
cowpox and smallpox modifications of same disease, 166;
description of in cow and man, 109;
generation in horsegrease beyond possibility of denial, 100, 110, 112;
reasons for this belief, 154;
difficulty of proof, 100;
indistinguishable in effects from horsegrease, 156, 157;
an uncommon and erratic disease, 75;
probable extinction, 111;
when it ought to be taken, 111;
its inflammation always erysipelatous, 143;
sores eat into flesh, and action checked with escharotics, 157;
recommended as an expulsive irritant, 123.
 Mr. Knight attests common faith, 132;
notorious belief in its prophylaxy, 94, 136-139, 179;
Jesty and Nash’s claims, 94-95, 204-206;
unnoticed in Cheshire, 133;
well known in south and unknown in north of England, 137;
known in Gloucestershire not to prevent smallpox, 95, 165;
inquiry of Ingenhousz in Wilts, 130;
unknown in New England, 375;
unknown in bulls, 144, 272.
Discovered, 1799, in London, 145;
distributed by Pearson, 146;
its diverse action, 149;
Jenner’s views discriminated from Pearson’s, 153, 178, 198, 203, 347.
Spurious Cowpox, 99, 113;
various definitions by Jenner, 240;
in Spain, 401;
disowned by Jenner, 239, 336, 454;
a dodge, 278, 356;
Birch’s inquiry, 277-278;
Cobbett, 309;
Hamernik’s opinion, 519-522.

Crewe, Lady, and Jenner, 231.

Crichton, Dr., vaccination and enforcement in Russia, 406-407.

Croft, Dr., faith in cowpox in Staffordshire, 137.

Cross, John, the Norwich epidemic, 1819, 432-439.

Crow, Dr. E. J., 590.

Cumberland, Duke of, 219.

Dairymaids’ faith in cowpox, 95, 114, 334.

Dalkeith, vaccination introduced, 151.

Darwin, Erasmus, letter to Jenner, 275, 371.

Davis, Francis, Enniscorthy, 590.

Davy, Sir Humphry, hydrophobia, 359, 371.

De Carro, Vienna, writes to Jenner, 264, 266-267, 405;

uses horsegrease, 265, 404-405, 512;
conveys virus to India, 384;
Jenner’s congratulation, 385.

Decimation by smallpox, 76.

Delafaye, Dr., preaches and writes against variolation, 42.

Denmark, variolation, 62;

vaccination, 419-420.

Des Gouttes, smallpox and variolation in Geneva, 61.

Devonshire, Duchess of, works for Jenner, 230.

Diarrhœa and vaccination, Newcastle, 429-430.

Diderot, promotes variolation, 59.

Diet, influence on smallpox, 87.

Dilke, Sir Charles, 578.

Dillwyn, William, letter from Jenner, 341-344.

Dimsdale, Dr. Thomas, variolator, 47-48;

controversy with Lettsom, 49;
summoned to Russia to variolate Catharine, 63;
price paid for job, 64, 362;
variolation from arm-to-arm, 76;
parish variolations, 379;
might have anticipated Jenner, 514.

Doddridge, Dr., favours variolation, 41.

Dog distemper, 360;

Jenner vaccinates King’s staghounds, 360.

Dolling, Mr., Blandford, vaccination before Jenner, 138.

Domeier, Dr., 221.

Don Quixote, 595.

Downe, Mr., Bridport, vaccination before Jenner, 139, 204.

Drew, Rev. Herman, anticipates vaccination, 138.

Drysdale, Dr., 84.

Druitt, Dr., 547.

Dublin, variolation, 34.

Dublin Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons report on vaccination, 242-243.

Dudgeon, H. D., 585-586.

Dumfries, variolation introduced, 34.

Duncan, Dr., introduces vaccination to Edinburgh, 151.

Duncombe, Thomas, discomfits sharp practice in House of Commons, 498-499;

disapproves of compulsion, 499, 529.

Dundee, vaccination introduced, 151.

Dunning, Mr., surgeon, 89, 340, 361, 385, 389, 390, 394;
enthusiasm for Jenner, 196;
first uses words vaccinate and vaccination, 229.

Dusthall, Anna, first vaccinated in India, 385.

Dutch in Ceylon, 392.

East India Company, 220.

Edinburgh, smallpox in 18th century, 50;

triumph of vaccination, 1806, 71;
vaccination introduced, 1799, 151;
smallpox epidemic among the vaccinated, 1818-19, 366;
variolation disused, 1815, and no smallpox, 463.
Edinburgh Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons report on vaccination, 241.

Edinburgh Dispensary and smallpox, 1805, 242;

official answer to Dr. Brown, 287.

Edinburgh Medical Journal, Brown of Musselburgh, 351.

Edinburgh Review, 300, 302, 303, 350;

comparative fatality of smallpox and variolation, 66;
smallpox diffused by variolation, 69;
rapid acceptance of vaccination, 70;
attacked by John Ring, 173;
anti-vaccinators described, 289;
a homicidal article, 364.

Edwards, Jonathan, killed by variolation, 56.

Egremont, Earl of, 167, 168, 220, 231.

Eldon, Lord, 73.

Elephants’ milk, 327.

Elgin, Lord, 384.

Ellenborough, asserts influence of vaccination to be transient, 353;

Jenner’s indignation, 354;
encounter with Jenner, 357;
Epidemiological Society, 482.

Ellis, Mr., fraud, 387.

Emerson, R. W., Dr. Garth Wilkinson, 549.

Emery, Aaron, evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 555.

Encyclopædia Britannica, horsegrease and cowpox, 271.

Endowment of research illustrated by National Vaccine Establishment, 461.

English Cyclopædia, Cotton Mather and Lady M. W. Montagu, 7.

English death-rates compared with Austrian, 506.

Engrafting the smallpox, 1.

Enniscorthy, 508-509, 590.

Epidemics, Dr. Waterhouse bewildered, 382.

Epidemics of smallpox, Dr. Seaton on their irregular character, 568.

Epidemiological Society, organised to promote trade in vaccination, 480-491;

primes Lord Lyttelton, 480,
and W. F. Cowper, 497;
untruthful report, 485;
presses for more vaccination, 492;
bolder demands and more untruthful, 493-495;
medical place hunters, 497, 500.

Epps, Dr., variolation, 74;

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, 226;
character of Dr. Walker, 331.

Equination, 229, 264, 265, 368;

practised by Jenner, 268-269.

Erskine, Sir J. Sinclair, Jenner’s sacrifices, 194.

Erysipelas, a note of effective vaccination, 113, 119, 143, 157, 240, 279, 429, 503,
555.

Escharotics to allay vaccination, 109, 118, 157, 161, 198.

Evans, T. W., vaccination in Iceland, 420.

Evesham Guardians, advice from Local Government Board, 576.

Excell, Hannah, vaccinated, 118,

and vaccinifer, 128.

Faces, pock-marked, 468;

disappearance avouched by National Vaccine Establishment, 469-470.
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