Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/362

 plete and also infinite, and cannot be conscious of it except with these characters, — which shows that it cannot have come to us by transfer or communication. For if it did come in this way, then, in the first place, it must have a history, and a limit of history to date, quite as all else that comes so has; and this would mean that it must be thought as finite in quantity, as well as an incomplete unity capable of increase. And, in the second place, its coming in this heroic fashion is itself unstatable and unthinkable, except in terms of Time itself; and this shows that the pretended empirical explanation requires the preemployment of the thing whose origin it would clear up, — all the light the explanation gives, it borrows from the very thing it pretends to explain.

Time is therefore inevitably brought home to the soul as its real source, and our convinced judgment confesses the consciousness of Time to be a consciousness a priori; that is, an act of the soul, of the individual mind, in the spontaneous unity of its existence. It is seen to be a changeless principle of relation, by which the active-conscious self connects the items of experience into the serial order which we call sequence or succession, and blends the two concomitant series, physical and psychic, into the single whole that expresses the self’s own unity.

So a sufficiently strict interpretation of the modern psychological doctrine, instead of merely making