Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/358

 events is reducible to the succession of the acts of the Absolute. The first of these propositions requires no proof; an event cannot hang in the air, but must, as we say, take place between some things or in some subject. As to the second, the possibility has been suggested that events have no connection at all with one another, or merely for me as knowing them, and arranging them as successive, and again the possibility of there being different series of succession, for different individuals, so that the whole becomes somehow simultaneous; while A’s acts and knowledge proceed in the direction and order a b c, those of B may run in the order c b a, so that the orders cancel one another. But my knowledge is not a product of my own nature, it is a product rather of the interaction of spirit and body, which equally with the action of body upon body demands a universal subject to bring it about. My act of knowledge is only one side of this ultimate act. And as all material events are given as closely connected with one another, so must all spiritual events be, if only through the material, in intimate connection. The process of knowledge in one member of the spiritual world is therefore as closely related to that in another, as the movement of one body to that of another in space. Movements and acts alike may be simultaneous, but if so, then they are only different aspects of the one act of the Absolute, — that act in different references, different relations, we may say. So that just as all objects, all existing things, must coexist in one and the same space, “intelligible” or not, so all events must take place in one and the same time. The succession of the acts of the Absolute determines that of phenomenal events, ‘phenomenal’ meaning not the appearance of an unknown, but one aspect of a real, or the real in one of its references. (It is only in this sense that our knowledge is of phenomena, — because of its incompleteness.) It is therefore impossible that there should be different time-series in different directions.

What then are we to say of past, present, and future? Do these distinctions exist for the Absolute as for us, and if so, how are we to define the present? The answer lies in the distinction between the existence of a ‘thing’ or ‘subject,’ and that of ‘events’ or ‘acts.’ Only the latter are in time, are successive. It is obvious that in everything given to us in experience there are these two aspects, — the thing and the event, the individual and the act, the permanent and the changing, the one and the many; most of the disputes in philosophy have turned upon the questiou which of these two aspects is the ' real ' one, which the ‘phenomenal.’ But neither can be given up, the one is as real as the other. A thing which does not change, a change which