Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/38

22 our most serious estimation of this worth we make our distinction, not between present on the one hand and past and future on the other, but between the earlier and the later stages of a process, each moment of which is in turn future, present, and past.

It is clear then that we cannot justify the belief in the supreme importance of the later stages by appealing to the unique reality that the present moment has for us. Nay, more, if this unique reality should beguile us into supposing that only because of it has the present more importance than the past, we should be forced in the end to admit that the temporal position of the various realizations of value in an individual history is of no significance whatever. For we should have to say that any stage of the history, when present, is of more consequence than any of the others—past or future—but that its peculiar importance vanishes when it becomes part of the past. And since each stage in its turn is present, no stage would ultimately have more importance than any of the others. Thus, given so much of good in an individual life, it must be a matter of indifference in what part of it this good is contained.

It seems clear then that if we interpret change as meaning simply the emergence of a given content into the status of 'present' and its subsequent lapse into the status of 'past,' and if we suppose further that what is past is completely gone, we cannot justify the belief that we are considering: so far as the defence of the belief is concerned, we might quite as well declare change to be illusory. But is it not possible to assert the reality of change and at the same time to take a different position with regard to the past? May we not suppose that although the time-process is real, the earlier stages of a human life do not fade into utter non-existence when the later ones come into being? That in the history of the individual which was real is still real, let us say, in a highly significant sense. The life of the human being is a unity, not merely when you take it in cross-section, but also when you take it longitudinally. Each of its successive stages includes within itself all the preceding ones, and includes them in such fashion that they are at once preserved and transformed. Let us ask in what the preservation and the transformation must consist.