Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/248

 232 SHAD WORTH H. HODGSON: Time being thus universal in experience it follows that any difficulty which arises from the very nature of time cannot be avoided, but must be faced. And such is the difficulty signalised by Lotze. Time is a mode of continuity which has this peculi- arity, that, of any two points taken in it, one is earlier and the other later. In this it differs from that other mode of continuity, called spatial continuity or space, in which any two or more points have space between them, but exist simultaneously with each other. All contents of experience, then, since they have time as an element in them, are constantly passing, coming into and going out of immediate consciousness, and that portion of time which they occupy between the point of their entry and the point of their disappearance is called an empirical present moment. The content of an empirical present moment, thought of before it actually enters consciousness, is thought of as future ; one thought of after it has disappeared is thought of as past. Now all our experience takes place in empirical present moments. All our thoughts, memories, imaginations, expecta- tions, feelings, volitions, and so on, as well as sense presentations, are passing contents of present moments. We cannot think of present contents except as now existing ; we cannot think of past or future contents except as now not existing. About these taken as existent (or non-existent) portions of consciousness, there is no difficulty. Only a present content exists now, or is present. But what about the objects of which these existent present contents appear to be a knowledge ? and among them what about those objects which we call real, what about Reality, in which time is just as essential an element as in empirical present moments of experience ? Must not reality also, since it shares the nature of time, come into and pass out of real existence, just as empirical contents of experience come into and pass out of actual existence as states of consciousness ? The answer is, I think, plain. States of reality do in fact come into real existence and pass out of real existence, just as contents of consciousness, which are our experience, pass into and out of experience. But not Reality as a whole, any more than Experience as a whole. Reality exists in successive empirical states, each having duration in time, just as our experience of it does. We have, then, to conceive Reality so far as we can form any positive conception of it at all as consisting of a series of changing states of physical matter, forming, in Mr. Bosanquet's words, " a world- process itself extended in time ". This conception I adopt, but not with Mr. Bosanquet's interpretation, that it or any so-called " background " of experience is " timeless ". And I conceive the whole world-process as real, in the sense that all the simultane- ously existing parts of any present empirical state of it are in action and re-action on one another, so as to produce a new state, or new configuration of parts ; the uniformities discoverable in