Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/247

 IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTURE TIME EXIST? 231 between accepting the permanent nature of the continuity as the higher form of reality, thus taking the essence of past and future to form one timeless whole along with the essence of the present ; and erecting a distinction of principle between the work of the mind, e.g., the body of science, and the given sensuous series, which would carry us back to the point at which John Locke began ? BERNARD BOSANQUET. II. NOTWITHSTANDING the realistic character of the hypothesis apparently accepted by Mr. Bosanquet as a compromise or via media, and put forward less as an assault upon, than an interpre- tation of, what he considers to be the hypothesis of natural realism, I am wholly unable to see that it either avoids or solves the difficulty signalised by Lotze and Mr. Bradley as inherent in the conception of time as real namely, that it involves conceiving both past and future time as wholly non-existent. It does not avoid it, because the "permanent nature of the continuity in the higher form of reality " does not, as he supposes, make that reality " one timeless whole," but rather renders more undeniably evident the necessity of time to reality. For the very meaning of permanence is duration of something in time ; and the very meaning of continuity is absence of breaks or intervals in such a permanence. Time cannot be perceived, imagined, or thought of, save as a continuum, the discreteness of which, when it exists, is introduced either by thought, or by some difference in the quality of its content ; upon which discreteness its being thought of as a succession of parts depends. Yet though I must on this account reject one of Mr. Bosanquet's final alternatives, I do not therefore accept the other, for reasons which will presently appear. While the first alternative does not avoid Lotze's difficulty about time, neither does it solve it. No attempt whatever is made to solve it, so far as I see, in Mr. Bosanquet's paper. It is not even faced. Time is an essential element in experience, and therefore in our conception of reality ; it is essential both to consciousness and to reality, and common to both. When, for instance, we handle a solid object, the present moment of the existence of that object and the present moment of our feeling it are one and the same present moment of time. " What is Being," says one of the chief personages in a dialogue of Plato's, " but sharing in some definite nature in present time, as to have been is to have shared in some definite nature in past time, and to be going to be is to be going to share in some definite nature in future time ? What say you ? It is very true. Well, then, Unity shares in time, if it shares in Being." (Plato's Parmenides, 151, E.) Unity (Iv) is the subject under discussion.