Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/137

Nature will be of central concern to us. When we come to deal with the individual Self, we shall again have to face the question: In what sense has the Self of the individual a purely Temporal, and in what sense an Eternal type of reality? And before we can answer this question we must be more precise than we have yet been in denning the terms Time and Eternity. The issue here involved has a significance not only theoretical, but also intensely practical. It will need therefore a close and deliberate scrutiny. Time, as we shall soon see, is a concept of fundamentally practical meaning. The definition of the Eternal, on the other hand, has very close relations to the question as to the ultimate significance of all that is practical. Any rational decision as between a pessimistic and an optimistic view of the world, any account of the relations between God and Man, any view of the sense in which the evils and imperfections of the Universe can be comprehended or justified, any account of our ethical consciousness in terms reconcilable with our Idealism, — in brief, any philosophical reconciliation with religion and life, must turn in part upon a distinction between the Temporal and the Eternal, and upon an insight into their unity in the midst of their contrast. The problem at issue is one of the most delicate and, at the same time, one of the simplest of the great issues of philosophy. I shall here have to deal with it at first in a purely theoretical fashion, and shall then proceed to its practical applications. For both aspects of the question we are now fully prepared.