may be known to me at all, there must be recollection, and therefore an experience other than that which I now have, — therefore change, — and when change is admitted, all is admitted. Without this, had I a fixed place in the sum of conditions and conditioned within the real, then it would be impossible for me to know either a past or a future, or to make any distinction between these and my present. All that I knew would be for me equally real, just as the parts of a syllogism have equal reality for me when I think them. I do not place the premisses in the past, and the conclusion in the future, but regard all as a timeless whole. So it would be were I an element in such a non-temporal reality, and confined for my knowledge to my place within it.
On such grounds Lotze decides that while empty time can have no reality outside of our apprehension, and is a notion formed psychologically by the abstraction from events of the time-element in their occurrence, which we learn by temporal signs analogous to the local signs, and which by the help of spatial images we form into a whole and endow with independent existence, still there must be some reality to which the signs correspond, and this he finds in the succession of events. Time accordingly does not condition the course of events, but the latter alone is real, and creates in us the form known as time. Succession then is real, and it is only at isolated moments that Lotze contemplates a reality which should be wholly timeless, as when he speaks of “the truly existing as exalted above all Time-process, and yet so to be thought that in its being and essence a time-process takes place.” At times he seems to accept the possibility of that which he had previously denied, — the real as a sum of conditions and conditioned, timelessly existing.
That there should be a real succession of events is necessary to explain the fact of our experience, and accordingly must be accepted; and time as the sum of the relations (of succession) between these events is valid of the real. But here as in all other cases it is true that there can be no relations between independent realities, whether the latter are things or events. Two such realities would on the contrary be each in a world for itself, unaffected by the other. Related events are doubly dependent. An event as such cannot stand alone bit must be referred to a subject, so that event in the last analysis is equivalent to act. Lotze has sufficiently shown that the interaction of two objects must ultimately be explained by the act of a universal subject present in both. Further, where events are related to each other as successive, they must be referred ultimately to one subject, so that the succession of
