In Ch. Osgood’s scheme of the Semantic Differential, the adjectival opposites Good-Bad, Strong-Weak, and Active-Passive play a key role. They seem to be transculturally valid to various extents, with the Good-Bad pair most, the Strong-Weak the next, and the last least so, sometimes being replaced by Fast-Slow (which is almost a synonym) or Hot-Cold.
The following is an extensive list of opposites from R. Gregg (“Self-Transcendence”, London, Gollancz, 1956, pp. 61-62), (as cited by Stephen Sayers in “The Eternal Embrace”, Friends Quarterly, July 1999, pp. 293-299). Some of them are nouns rather than adjectives.
From the senses: hot-cold, hard-soft, sweet-sour, light-dark, sound-silence, fragrance-fetor, vertical-horizontal, rest-motion, winter-summer, night-day.
From the mind: truth-error, wisdom-folly, belief-doubt, symmetry-distortion, growth-decay, many-few, cause-effect, change-permanence, creation-destruction, subject-object, attack-defence, willing-reluctant, freedom-necessity
From feelings: like-dislike, pleasure-pain, love-hate, hope-despair.
From moral nature: good-evil, pride-humility, innocence-guilt, courage-cowardice, respect-contempt.
From science: acid-base, positive-negative electric charges, north-south magnetic poles, crest-trough of a wave, oxidation-reduction, clockwise-anticlockwise spin, life-non-life, analysis-synthesis.
Sayers claims that perception of the world in terms of opposites arises from our experience as time-dependent beings. This creates ambivalence and perpetual existential anxiety. We know that all clouds have a silver lining (a source of hope, but also that all silver linings imply clouds (a source of despair). Thus a life lived primarily in the plane of time will know of anxiety, but never be entirely without hope.
However, eternity is the absence of the perception of time as an inexorably forward-flowing river. Eternity is not an infinitely extended time, but the ever-present moment to include both the past and the future. Time is, after all, only a (somewhat imaginary, but only in the mathematical sense) dimension of the space-time continuum, according to the theory of relativity.
The sense of eternity, which is the essence of immortality, can be achieved in this life by deep meditation, the communion with God. In this expanded awareness of the present, we are nearer to the past and the future than it is ever possible to be. The eternal binds past, present and future together. “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end”, saith the Lord.
Gregg compares this with a “gathered” Quaker meeting for worship, in which all temporal distinctions, between God and humanity, the dead and the living, you and me, past and future are weakened by the radiance of eternity. We can feel all with us, fused with our own being, in an eternal embrace.