the sense in which the melody, or other sequence, is
known at once to our own consciousness, despite the fact
that its elements when viewed merely in their temporal
succession are, in so far, not at once. As we saw before,
the brief span of our consciousness, the small range of
succession, that we can grasp at once, constitutes a
perfectly arbitrary limitation of our own special type of
consciousness. But in principle a time-sequence,
however brief, is already viewed in a way that is not
merely temporal, when, despite its sequence, it is grasped
at once, and is thus grasped not through mere memory,
but by virtue of actual experience. A consciousness
related to the whole of the world’s events, and to
the whole of time, precisely as our human consciousness
is related to a single melody or rhythm, and
to the brief but still extended interval of time which
this melody or rhythm occupies, — such a consciousness,
I say, is an Eternal Consciousness. In principle we
already possess and are acquainted with the nature of
such a consciousness, whenever we do experience any
succession as one whole. The only thing needed to
complete our idea of what an actually eternal consciousness
is, is the conceived removal of that arbitrary limitation
which permits us men to observe indeed at once
a succession, but forbids us to observe a succession at
once in case it occupies more than a very few seconds.
IV
This definition of the relations of the Temporal and the Eternal accomplishes all the purposes that are us-
