Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/44

28 they seem to have to transform the values of the earlier stages. Even supposing that he has justified us in regarding the quality of the later stages as more important than that of the earlier, he has done nothing to validate our belief that later good makes up for earlier evil, and later evil spoils earlier good: he has not shown how it is possible that the quality of one stage should fix the value of the whole preceding life. For this compensatory function of the later stages the only explanation that we have yet found is that furnished by our conception of the individual human life as a whole that more and more comes to be.

Let us now gather up the threads of our discussion. We began by asking how we must conceive the relation of the individual life to the time-process in order to justify our belief in the supreme importance of its later stages. We showed in the first place that the order and the irreversibility of the time-process must be accepted as real. Next we made the assertion—to be defended later—that the reality of change must also be affirmed. At this point it seemed necessary to explain what we meant by asserting the reality of change, and in particular to define our position with reference to the problem of the existence or non-existence of past events. In considering this problem we limited ourselves to the life of the human individual. And the theory that we tried to develop is that the past of such a life is not altogether non-existent: it lives to some extent in memory; it lives still more completely in the influence of the earlier upon the later; it lives most truly of all in the sense that this later is what it has become and that thus it is held in solution, as it were, in this later. And it is this third aspect of the continued existence