Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/245

 IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTUEE TIME EXIST? 229 the other hand, are not present, how can they be real ? Again, in establishing a Law, itself without special relation to time, science treats facts from various dates as all possessing the same value. Yet how, if we seriously mean to take time as real, can the past be reality?" (Appearance and Reality, p. 208). The difficulty of the infinite thinness of that strip of light which according to a natural logic should form our present, has been disposed of, so far as experience goes, by psychology. Though the conception of a flux or succession may seem to imply a present which perishes in appearing, it is evident that in fact our present is not of this nature, but includes duration, and is variable in its extension. Thus we are not brought face to face with a mere series of vanishing points, such as Lotze's language presupposes ; although it may be that this escape from one perplexity is only purchased at the cost of another. For there is something strange about a succession any length of which can be taken as present and treated as if it all existed at once. But waiving this form of the difficulty, what I desire to ask is this : Can an intermediate or improved form of the common-sense doctrine be suggested, such as to be free from the difficulties which Lotze and Bradley point out in our natural conception of time as real, and Past or Future as non-existent ? " Why should not time be real," it may be said, " as the form of a process at once successive and continuous?" A unity there undoubtedly is in reality ; the past causes or conditions the present, and the present the future. But why should not a unity develop itself through the continuous nexus of phases in succes- sion ? And w r hy should not the laws of nature or the systematic and coherent element of harmony which finds expression in science, art and religion, be simply the generalised character and connexion of that which in actuality exists, as it seems to exist with a continuity no less real than its succession ? Why sacrifice one element of apparent reality, its successiveness, to the other, its continuity; and if we do so, are we not destroying both? On such a theory, which represents, I think, the position of the natural man when once it has been thoroughly made clear that change or succession without a continuity is unmeaning, nay, even that " nothing but the permanent can change," I presume that past and future would exist, so to speak, indirectly. Dis- tinctions of tense would have a genuine meaning in the relations of cause to effect within an order of real conditioning. But the present tense alone, implying a certain duration, would predicate existence in the full sense. It would be quite agreed that the past and the future make a difference to the present. But they would be held to exist only in and through this difference, and would be realities only, in the case of the past, as effects, in the case of the future, as anticipations (the contents of which might be ascribed as attributes to objects). The difficulties of such a view arise from the thorough unity of