Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/244

V. DISCUSSIONS. IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTUEE TIME EXIST ? i I. THE difficulty which this question embodies is stated in a striking form by Lotze. And although it is admitted that philosophy cannot see its way to a victorious doctrine of a timeless reality, without an experience which we do not possess, it is useful to re- consider the common-sense view of Time, in order that we may not deceive ourselves as to the possibility of acquiescing in it. Are Past and Future 2 this is Lotze's question really non- existent? And if they are nothing at all, have we altogether grasped what such an assertion involves? "The history of the world, is it really reduced to the infinitely thin, for ever changing, strip of light which forms the present, wavering between a dark- ness of the Past, which is done with and no longer anything at all, and a darkness of the future, w T hich is also nothing? " And he further points out that in the natural images which he here makes use of, he has softened down the difficulty, in compliance with the inevitable bias of popular fancy. For these two abysses of obscurity, past and future, however formless and empty, would still be there. But let any one try to dispense with these images, and to banish from thought even the two voids which limit being; he will then feel how impossible it is to get along with the naked antithesis of being and not-being, and how unconquerable is the demand to think even of that which is not as some unaccountable constituent of the real. " Therefore it is," he continues, " that we speak of distances of the Past and of the Future, covering under this spatial image the need of letting nothing slip completely from the larger whole of reality, though it belong not to the more limited reality of the Present." Bradley states the point more tersely. Science " habitually treats past and future as one thing with the present. The char- acter of an existence is determined by what it has been, and by what it is (potentially) about to be. But if these attributes, on 1 Bead before the Aristotelian Society. 2 Metaphysie, book ii., ch. 3.