Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/42

26 unity, which is revealed in varying degrees of completeness in the different parts of the temporal process. When I say that each human life is a unitary whole, I do not mean to imply that the unity is something that is once for all there and that the various stages are so many different manifestations of it. I mean rather that it is a unity that has its very being in time. Each stage in its turn is in a sense the whole life; but each new stage is more truly, because more fully, the whole life than any of the preceding ones were.

Now if the life of the human being is a unity of this kind, it is clear that the temporal position of the various realizations of value in it is a matter of profound significance. A man's life is more nearly identical with certain of its stages than with others: every new stage is more truly the life than any of its predecessors have been. And if this is so, we can understand, at least in some measure, how it is that the value of the earlier may be canceled by that of the later. We said above that the inclusion of the earlier stages in the later, implied in our conception, involves not only their preservation but also their transformation. The transformation consists in the fact that the earlier has come to be the later. Whatever may be true of change in general, the change that characterizes the life of a human being is not a replacing of one content by another content, but the transformation of the one into the other. Now if the earlier is changed into the later, we can see how the value of the later may stand for that of the earlier, how later good can atone for an earlier evil and later evil can wipe out an earlier good.

But at this point we must pause to answer an objection that may arise in the minds of some of our readers. Granted that the greater importance of the later stages of life could be explained on the assumption that has been made, one may yet ask whether it could not be equally well explained by a simpler assumption. May it not be that the later stages are more important than the earlier simply because the quality of still later stages depends more upon them than upon their predecessors? In the life-series a, b, c, ... n, the stage g is more