160 struggling with the worldclassical ontology. It also off ers instances of the idea of the two regimes
connected with either the rejection or the ac cep tance of classical ontol-
og y. What it has rarely provided us with are cases of combination of the
doctrine of the one regime with the rejection of classical ontology. In
recent times, the philosophies of Bergson and Whitehead came closest
to such a position.
However, this third view is the one that we have the most reason to
embrace. It is also the only one of the three positions that can be recon-
ciled with the aims and assumptions of the struggle with the world.
In this view, the whole of the cosmos has a history. In that history,
time is the only reality that is not emergent. Cosmology is a historical sci-
ence. Th e elementary constituents of the world and the laws, symmetries,
and supposed constants, which now form the main object of basic sci-
ence, once did not exist. Th e distinction between the laws of nature and
the phenomena that they govern did not then apply, and may one day no
longer hold. Established science mistakes the workings of nature in the
cooled- down, consolidated universe for the way nature works always and
everywhere. Everything in the universe changes sooner or later.
Universal nature conceived in this fashion exhibits the attributes that
we are accustomed to see in natural history but are surprised to redis-
cover at the most basic levels of reality. Th ere is universal path de pen-
den cy: what comes before matters to what comes later, and causal se-
quences, sometimes forming a tight system, may at other times be only
loosely connected. All the types of being, or natural kinds, are ephem-
eral and mutable, in contradiction to the aims of classical ontology. Th e
laws, symmetries, and constants of nature evolve, sometimes quickly
and other times slowly, together with the phenomena exhibiting them.
Nothing, not even these regularities, stands outside the reach of time,
which alone persists, as all else emerges, changes, and vanishes.
Such a world, in which time is inclusively real, has room for the
new: the new that changes the workings of nature, the new that is not
simply the enactment of a predetermined possible state of aff airs,
stalking the world as a ghost and waiting for its cue to come onto the
stage of actuality.
For such a view, the one that most naturally suits the struggle with
the world and best makes sense of its presuppositions, time is the most
fundamental reality. Its central place in the understanding of nature is