Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/361

 possibility of knowledge, and of an object to be known, are secured to us, — by regarding the succession of events as the succession of the acts of the Absolute. By this means the empty unity receives filling, the harmony is seen to be a real harmony, the Absolute becomes a living Being, the Unknowable becomes knowable through His acts. For just as our sole knowledge of the character of the finite individual is derived from his acts, so it is with the Infinite. He is what he does, and all our knowledge of natural events, of human events, is as such an approximation to a knowledge of the Absolute.

To apply our theory to the question of the relation of time to the Absolute, of the reality of past and future as compared with that of the present, it is obvious that the Absolute in himself is throughout all time equally real, while no act can claim higher reality than another; but it is of the very nature of an act to perish in existing, and as it is, it constitutes what is for us the present. Our present is therefore regulated by and dependent on the acts of the Absolute. The difficulties connected with it, — that for example of fixing in it some point which really is the present, — all depend upon our defective notion of the meaning of ‘event.’ The acts of the Absolute, even if they are no longer acts in the sense of purposive, directed to an end, but mere pulsations of experience, must be thought of as momentary, discrete, successive; there is no other way of comprehending the universe. Each act or pulsation as it exists, is the real present, or rather the content of the present. And however we may conceive the Absolute, this at any rate is clear, even to materialism, that every act, or event, involves in itself all that have preceded it, — the past, — and all that are to follow it, — the future. The existence of the present act is in toto different from that of all that have gone before and from that of all that are to come; as moments in the present the past may persist, and the future be involved, but they have no longer or not yet the independent existence of the actual act. It is this which is the true reality; time as a whole therefore has no existence except as an abstraction from the relations of events in the mind of the subject, the past has no existence except in memory or as a moment in the present, the future none except in foresight or inference, or again as a moment involved in the present. The Absolute is the permanently existing real Subject, the present act the momentarily existing real event. Nor is it to be supposed that time exists between the acts, unfilled by any event, for this is just that empty time which we have seen to be illusory; on the contrary the acts of the Absolute must be thought of, to use a space-metaphor, as touching one another, as do the points of a line. The Absolute as in itself, gives the continuity, as in its acts, the discreteness of Time.