Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/255

 IN WHAT SENSE, IF ANY, DO PAST AND FUTURE TIME EXIST? 239 in various parts of his paper that the content of thought, when it, as such, has reference to time, may differ in respect of its time- relations from the thought which thinks it. And, if this be so, the mere fact that we can only think in time can never prove that everything we think of need be so, except in so far as we are thinking it. However, in connexion with the ' reality ' of universal truth, I a,m glad to be able for once to side with Mr. Hodgson against Mr. Bosanquet. Although I hold that the point which is made against Mr. Bosanquet, in respect of his use of the word ' always ' to describe the validity of universal truth, is in part merely verbal ; yet I do think there is some real objection to the use which Mr. JBosanquet makes of the notions of 'permanence' and 'continuity'. As to the former term I heartily agree to Mr. Hodgson's assertion that its ' very meaning is duration of something in time'. The latter I wish to investigate more carefully. Mr. Bosanquet, I cannot but think, tends to confuse two meanings of continuity which it is most important to distinguish. J?or instance, in the passage in which he supposes a theory for the ' natural man ' who has once thoroughly understood that tinuous nexus of phases in succession ' might be identified with the causes or conditions the present, and the present the future '. He seems to suggest that such unities as the laws of nature may be the continuous element in time. And his further argument in no way invalidates this part of the supposed plain man's view. It is only directed to show that the plain man must ultimately admit this continuous element to be a higher form of reality than the successiveness, which he at first supposed could not be sacri- ficed without involving the destruction of the continuity. Thus Mr. Bosanquet' s final conception might seem to involve that we should think adequately of reality, if we imagined every content that we have reason to think real persisting unchanged through an endless time a conception similar to some theological notions of Eternity (Milton's ' Long Eternity,' for example) and which might seem to make it impossible for beings in such a state to recognise that they were in time (since change seems to be a ratio cognoscendi of time), but which would not, for that reason, preclude their really being so. Surely the continuity of time, as it is generally understood, would really be destroyed along with its successiveness ; but successiveness in no way involves any differ- ence of content in events, other than that which constitutes the difference of one moment of empty time from another. The continuity of time is its qualitative nature as immediately perceived ; ' time,' as Mr. Bradley says, ' is not a mere relation '. But the continuity which we must suppose to belong to reality is not this special quality of time, which as a mere quality is as unreal as the relation of succession. A universal, such as a law of
 * nothing but the permanent can change/ he speaks as if a ' con-
 * undoubted unity in reality ' constituted by the fact that ' the past