Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/384

Rh fine a quantity in either of two ways: first, as an unattainable Limit, defined only by means of the series which fails to attain it; and, secondly, as the otherwise known quantity which may be viewed as the Limit of a series. Inadequate as is the similitude, it may suffice to hint that the antinomy is soluble. And here there is room only for the hint.

Granting, however, that what appears in time as an endless moral process is known from the eternal point of view as fulfilled fact, Professor Mezes seems to be quite wrong in supposing that the real distinction between the earlier and later stages of a temporal process would vanish, from an eternal point of view. From the point of view which recognises the otherwise known and attained Limit as the unattainable goal of the infinite series, the infinite series itself exists, in its own way and degree; and its earlier terms are still quite distinct from its later terms, so that the earlier, as earlier, retain their definable place and significance in the series. Just so, that the earlier stages of a finite life — a life that appears to us temporally endless, but that, absolutely viewed, is the life of a finite being — are earlier, are present at only one point in time, and are past for all later moments, — this, from the absolute point of view, as from our own, is a fact precisely as real as is time itself. And, as has now been sufficiently pointed out, time does not vanish, from the eternal point of view, any more than any incomplete experience vanishes, from a more inclusive point of view. The Absolute is not, in our account, a Void into which the finite realities pass and vanish. It is precisely such