Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/33

Rh at rest. Nothing is permanent but change. Such a world cannot give satisfaction to the inextinguishable desire for an apprehension, or at least an assured faith, in the Infinite. Is there not, Kant asks, a point of view from which the finite and partial world of experience may be seen to be but the outward manifestation of the real or infinite? It is true that we can have experience only of the finite. Even our own desires and volitions we are compelled to present under the form of time, and therefore as a finite series; but, on the other hand, we are warned by the consciousness of the infinite not to assume that in their inner nature they are merely temporal events. It is much that, if we cannot know things sub specie æternitatis, we are aware that what we do know is presented only sub specie temporis. Thus the consciousness of the limitations of human intelligence suggests the idea of an intelligence that is unlimited — a perceptive intelligence which does not proceed, by a successive process of synthesis, from part to part, but contemplates reality in its fulness and perfection. We are therefore compelled to think of a reality that is not borne along on a changing stream of time, but is beyond time, self-complete and self-determining. This conception prepares the way for a true view of man as an active or moral being. Our own actions we have to represent as events occurring in an inviolable order of succession, but there is nothing self-contradictory in the idea that in their real nature they are not events. In fact, the idea of the real as the individually complete, forces us to think of a sort of causality which is not an eternal regress towards a first cause that is not first, a beginning that is no beginning. Of such a causality we cannot, it is true, have direct experience; but though it is an impossible experience, it is not an impossible reality. This much, therefore, we may say, that a really causal being cannot be a mere series of events, but if it exists at all, it must be self-complete, self-dependent, free. That we are ourselves beings of this nature we cannot prove from experience, for experience is only of the relative and finite; but we are at least entitled to say that we may be free causes. There is in this hypothesis nothing incompatible with the fact that