Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/346



, it may be taken for granted, is no longer regarded by any school of philosophy as an ultimate reality subsisting for itself, but is looked upon as a relation, or series of relations, holding between events. As far as modern problems are concerned, the question is rather as to the validity of the time-relations in their application to the ultimately real, — whether, that is, the relations, and with them the events between which they hold, are merely appearances to human sense and thought of that which is in itself timeless and changeless, or whether, on the contrary, relations and events alike are in any sense predicable of the real. The former view is that of very ditferent schools. Mystics of every type and empirical believers in an Unknowable or Transcendent Reality of which we may predicate nothing that we find in the actual universe of experience; while the latter view also finds defenders in otherwise opposite camps. The meaning of the problem will be clear if we lay before ourselves the results which logically follow from acceptance of one or other of the two views. If the time-succession is unreal, or only a form of appearance of the ultimately real, — from the knowledge of which we are in either case excluded, — then change is equally so, activity also, final causes or ends, development, morality, everything in fact which we regard as valuable in our universe. With the non-reality of time all these must fall, and what is there that remains? In our experience a system of thought-contents alone answers to the reality required: it alone is, as such, out of time and unchanging; but no one would be prepared to identify the real with such a system, which in itself is a pure abstraction, without real existence, depending rather on the subject which thinks it. We are therefore referred outside of experience to an incomprehensible, whether it be the Unknowable of Herbert Spencer, or the harmonious Experience of Mr Bradley. According to the latter