Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 2.djvu/506

 between that which does, and that which does not, happen in time, must be an ultimate distinction; and how are we to make, if this is so, a transition from the one to the other?

So far as a thing is timeless, it cannot change, for with change time comes necessarily. But how can a thing which does not change produce an effect in time? That the effect was produced in time implies that it had a beginning. And if the effect begins, while no beginning can be assigned to the cause, we are left to choose between two alternatives. Either there is something in the effect — that is, the quality of coming about as a change — which is altogether uncaused. Or the timeless reality is only a partial cause, and is determined to act by something which is not timeless. In either case the timeless reality fails to explain the succession in time, and we are no better off than we were before. It would be equally available as an explanation if the process had begun at any point besides the one at which it actually did begin, and a cause which can remain the same while the effect varies is obviously unsatisfactory.

It may be objected in answer to this that, if the dialectic process is the ultimate truth of all change, the point in time at which it is to begin is determined by the nature of the case. For time only exists, when change exists. The changeless would be the timeless. Therefore the beginning of the change must come at the beginning of time, and there can be no question why it should come at one moment rather than another.

This, however, is unsound. Actual time may only have begun with actual change. But possible time stretches back indefinitely beyond this. It is part of the essential nature of time that beyond any given part of it we can imagine a fresh part — indeed we must do so. We cannot conceive time as coming to an end. And with this indefinite stretch of possible time, the question again arises — what determined the timeless to produce change at the point it did, and not in the previous time, which we now regard as possible only, but which would have become actual by the production of change in it? And again there is no reason why the series of actual time should not have been placed later in the series of possible time than it actually was. Actual time begins whenever change begins, and so cannot be regarded as a fixed point by which the beginning of change can be determined. A certain amount of the dialectic process has now been realised in time. Can we give any reason why the amount should not have been greater or less? Yet if no such reason