Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/249

 IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTURE TIME EXIST? 233 these actions and re-actions being that which we know as Laws of Nature. By conceiving the successive states of the real world-process as empirical, that is, having duration, we leave room for the change wrought by action and re-action between them to take place, and so issue in a new state or configuration. The simultaneously existing parts which are said to be in action and re-action on one another are not to be considered changeless, because existing simultaneously, but as changing, though within certain limits and in certain respects only ; action and re-action being themselves a mode of change, and, as such, occupying time. Every part of an empirical state must be conceived as having a certain time- duration, during which it enters into action and re-action with other parts of the same state. If, however, it should be objected that any mode of motion, or of change, is inconceivable, because involving time, of which the prior limit must have ceased to exist before the latter limit comes into existence which I take to be the real point of the difficulty signalised by Lotze the reply is, that this is to reduce change or motion to a single changeless or motionless state, having no duration- which, I suppose, was the Eleatic conception of Reality. But to reduce Eeality or any state of it, in thought, to a single changeless state having no duration, has the very opposite consequence to that which is intended by its advocates ; for it involves reducing an empirical present moment of real existence to a mathematical instant of time, whereby it becomes a mere limit between past and future time, and these latter, so far from being non-existent, must then be thought of as the sole existing realities. Unless indeed we think of past and future existence as also non-existent, because not existing now ; in which case thought would become felo de se, having arrived at the conclusion of pure nihilism, which is incompatible with the fact of experience of any kind whatever. Thought cannot work without some experiential data to work upon, and all experiential data involve a former and a latter in time. To erect distinctions which are the mere machinery of thinking, and which presuppose some content into which they are introduced (as, for instance, abstract unity and number, abstract figure in space, the abstract logical laws of identity and contradiction, or the abstract limit between past and future time) into independent realities, is mischievous pedantry. To the view now taken, I cannot, for my part, see that what Mr. Bosanquet puts as an alternative conception, at the end of his paper, is any real or exclusive alternative at all. I certainly do not wish to " erect a distinction of principle between the work of the mind, e.g., the body of science, and the given sensuous series ". I see, of course, that sense-perception and thought are two very different functions, or modes of experiencing ; but both alike refer to and deal with the same content of experience, and the same real world-process. There is, so far as I can see, no timeless background to either the one or the other.