Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/154

internal succession. But in that case, within the real present of the time-world, there are already contained the distinctions that, in case of the time of experience, we have heretofore observed. If, in what you choose to call the present moment of the world’s history, deeds are accomplished, suns actually move from place to place, light waves traverse the ether, and men’s lives pass from stage to stage, then within what you thus call the present there are distinguishable and more elementary events, arranged in series, such that when any conceived element, or mere elementary portion of any series is taken in relation to its predecessors and successors, it is not yet when its antecedents are taken as temporally present, and is past and gone when its successors are viewed as present. The world’s time is thus in all respects a generalized and extended image and correspondent of the observed time of our inner experience. In the time of our more direct experience, we find a twofold way in which we can significantly call a portion of time a present moment. The present, in our inner experience, means a whole series of events grasped by somebody as having some unity for his consciousness, and as having its own single internal meaning. This was what we meant by the present experience of this musical phrase, this spoken line of verse, this series of rhythmic beats. But, in the other sense of the word, an element within any such whole is present in so far as this element has antecedents and successors, so that they are no longer or not yet when it is temporally viewed as present, while in turn, in so far as any one of them is viewed as the present element,