any meaning. Time is the form of the Will; and the
real world is a temporal world in so far as, in various
regions of that world, seeking differs from attainment,
pursuit is external to its own goal, the imperfect tends
towards its own perfection, or in brief, the internal
meanings of finite life gradually win, in successive stages,
their union with their own External Meaning. The
general justification for this whole view of the time
of the real world is furnished by our idealistic
interpretation of Being. The special grounds for regarding
the particular Being of time itself as in this special
way teleological, are furnished by the foregoing analysis
of our own experience of time, and by the fact that
the conceptual time in terms of which we interpret the
order of the world at large, is fashioned, so to speak,
after the model of the time of our own experience.
III
Having thus defined the way in which the conceptual time of the real world of common sense corresponds in its structure to the structure of the time known to our inner perception, we are prepared to sketch our theory both of the sense in which the world of our idealistic doctrine appears to be capable of interpretation as a Temporal order, and of the sense in which, for this same theory, this world is to be viewed as an Eternal order. For, as a fact, in defining time we have already, and inevitably, defined eternity; and a temporal world must needs be, when viewed in its wholeness, an eternal world. We have only to review the structure of Reality in the light
