Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/356

the course of events, as a last condition added to others in producing any particular change. If all the material conditions are given, it seems that the change must be given also, and simultaneously; if not, the event can never happen. And if, all the conditions being given, the event is not simultaneously present, there seems no reason why it should appear a moment later, rather than a century later. Nor can we see why a particular place in the course of time should lend a particular value to a special reality, so that it thereby conditions changes over which it would otherwise have had no power. We are therefore compelled to give up the notion of empty time as a whole reality, containing and conditioning events. We do this the more readily, owing to the peculiar position which we wish to attribute to a particular moment of time, — the present. The primary difficulty of determining this present has been dwelt upon by Mr Bradley; no moment of time seems to be an irreducible unit, but always to contain smaller moments within itself, and a transition from past to present, from present to future. Time in fact seems to be wholly continuous, so that any divisions we may make are arbitrary and unreal. Perhaps a way may be found of avoiding this difficulty, but for the moment let it be taken for granted with Lotze that there is a present. Now if time were an existing whole, — an independent reality, — every part would necessarily have the same reality as every other, and therefore the content of each part, whereas we actually regard only one part as real, in the full sense, the past being no longer real and the future not yet. Still, the past seems to have gone ‘somewhere,’ to retain therefore some shadow of its reality, and the future to come from some ‘womb of time.’ Hence “the efforts, which are ever being renewed, to include the real process of becoming within the compass of an abiding reality.” The readiest way of solving this dilemma seems to be that of regarding the present as relative to our knowledge only, so that, while the real is timeless, we are compelled, owing to our position within the whole of reality, and the finitude of our knowledge, to regard what directly affects ourselves as more real, or rather as having a brighter reality, than what affects us more indirectly, as the condition of our actual feelings, or as conditioned by them. If the real is timeless, that is, a whole of conditioning and conditioned (supposing that we can apply any meaning to these terms in a timeless reality), then by this method we might explain the fact that it appears to us under the form of time. Even granting however that our own successive acts and feelings are themselves appearances to us of a timeless reality, as Kant held, there remains the insuperable objection that, in order that ‘the past’