Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/354

 of the non-reality of time seem to have their origin. It is held that in our consciousness we have given us a timeless reality, and it is felt that the real should be explained by the highest reality which we know, — our consciousness. This is the argument of Green; the possibility, it is said, of my being conscious of two successive events, as successive, — for example, of two ideas succeeding one another, — requires that consciousness, as subject, be present to both, and therefore itself out of time. In the same way, since all relations imply consciousness as a condition of their possibility, and succession is a relation, therefore we must ultimately suppose an eternal or timeless consciousness as present to, and as the condition of, the whole time-series. Whatever truth there may be in this view, it is here based on a false theory of knowledge, and of the relation of thought to reality. In a sense, of course, I must be present to the successive events of which I am conscious, but this does not prove that I am out of time any more than a tree is out of time because it suffers gradual growth and decay. The consciousness of each event, and the consciousness of their succession to each other are changes of myself as the stages of growth are changes of the tree. What misleads is that in the last act, the consciousness of the two events as successive, these events and their succession are held together as a content of knowledge, and as such, timeless; for by the act of thought abstraction is made from the existence of the events, and their occurrence in time, while time itself, in thought, is equally a timeless content. Not that the content is unchangeable for me; in each moment it is different from what it was in the previous one, but we unconsciously suppose an ideal content, that which the real would give if it were attainable by thought, and regard this a» existing even when it is no longer being thought. The fixed, timeless content however exists only for thought, in a thinking subject. Apart from changes within it, in its content, consciousness is the merest form; even a consciousness to which only one content is always present, — as the divine consciousness according to most idealists, — is inconceivable. We cannot in fact dispute the reality of change. This was in vain urged against Kant. “If I could intuite myself,” he says, “or be intuited by another being, without the condition of sensibility, then those very determinations which we now represent to ourselves as changes would present to us a knowledge in which the representation of time, and consequently of change, would not appear.” But surely this is the most baseless hypothesis that could be made, and one which explains nothing; one of its peculiar consequences is to be found in Kant’s theory of morally good and evil actions as the appear-