Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/37

No. 1.] At any moment then we can say that the happiness of the past, being dead and gone, can in no way compensate me for the fact that I am unhappy now, and similarly that the sorrow of the past cannot interfere with my present joy. But though the past has no power to alter the value of the present, the present seems in a certain sense able to affect that of the past. The present, since it alone is real, is all in all. Hence its happiness sweeps triumphantly away the griefs of an earlier time; or its misery settles like a pall over the fair face of bygone joys. In the insistent reality of the present it is as if the joy or the pain of the past had never been at all. And the same thing, mutatis mutandis, may be said of moral, intellectual, and æsthetic achievement. I am only that which I am now. If I am now sinful or intellectually slothful or insensible to beauty, the virtue, the mental activity, the æsthetic sensibility of my earlier life shall avail me nothing. But if I am now high-minded, mentally alert, or appreciative of beauty, the intellectual stagnation, the æsthetic insensibility, or the moral weakness of my past is wiped out by the attainment of this later period. But although it may seem at first thought that this account of the matter makes room for the belief in the supreme importance of the later stages of life, a brief reflection will convince us that it does not. For what we have been saying goes to show merely that present is more important for us than past, not that present and future are more important than past, or future than past and present. In fact, the inference that this way of thinking most naturally suggests is that the present has a value far outweighing that of either past or future. Now it is doubtless true, as we pointed out in our first paper, that for the naïve consciousness the present has precisely this supreme value. But what we have maintained is that for the higher insight of the reflective consciousness the future, if we can in any way overcome the disadvantages arising from its uncertainty, has greater value than the present. It does not, of course, even to the most highly reflective consciousness, give so keen a sense of reality as the present; but it has greater weight in determining the worth of life. Or, to put the matter more accurately, in