Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/252

 236 G. E. MOORE : a whole in any other sense than it exists in that part of the world which is present to us in any one of our " empirical moments ". But Mr. Hodgson seems to damage his answer very seriously when he asserts that the distinction of past and future must yet be supposed to exist in quite another sense in the consciousness of the deus ex machina, who is necessary to his solution of the problem. " The whole real world-process," he says, " would be to such a being the immediate object of a present experience, and that in any or every one of the successive empirical moments which would compose the history of his consciousness as an existent." His consciousness then would be an existent and would have a history ; and that being so, in what sense would the past and future moments of his consciousness exist ? Mr. Hodgson could only answer that they would be absolutely non-existent : " only a present content," he says, " exists now, or is present ". And he seems to see no difficulty in this assertion. But to those who cannot, as he does, treat consciousness as exclusive of reality (though, as we have seen, he also says it is " existent "), it will appear to re-open the whole discussion. At all events it is in this very transition of consciousness from past to present and future that Lotze found the difficulty that Mr. Hodgson professes not only to have faced but to have solved. In the chapter, from the end of which Mr. Bosanquet's quotation was taken, Lotze discusses at great length the possibility of conceiving the apparent succession of events in time as really nothing but the presentation of an unsuccessive whole to consciousness ; and, having admitted the possibility of this conception, he is only driven to the statement in question, by the impossibility of conceiving that events in consciousness itself (what Mr. Hodgson calls " empirical moments ") should appear to be successive, when they are really not successive. But apart from Mr. Hodgson's extraordinary assumption, which perhaps he may have justified elsewhere, but which seems to vitiate the whole of his paper and to make it very difficult to find a common ground for argument with him the assumption, namely, that consciousness is in no sense a constituent of reality, and that, there- fore, succession in consciousness, as not affecting the reality of time, needs no explanation ; apart from this, I think his final view may be shown to involve an open inconsistency with his premises. " The present moment of the existence of an object," says he, " and the present moment of our feeling it are one and the same present moment of time." Apply this to the consciousness of his deus ex machina, and we get the result that the whole world-process repeats itself in every successive moment in which it is presented to that consciousness. In that case, surely, the whole world-process is simply not the whole world-process. But there is another point in Mr. Hodgson's final conception which I think it will be well to discuss, because he accepts it from Mr. Bosanquet ; so that here I find myself forced to oppose them