Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/334

Rh by us all as objectively valid; and so it is the object of present ideas. But now I ask, in all seriousness, what is the irrevocable past now doing to our ideas that the fact of its irrevocable absence should, as cause, now be viewed as moulding our ideas? By means of what stamping process is the seal of the past impressing its form upon the wax of the present ideas? The irrevocable character of the past is a fact that can become object of an idea only by not being any present cause of ideas at all, since to be irrevocable means to be temporally over and done with altogether. If one says, “But past events were the causes that have led to present events, and that is why we now have ideas of the past,” then I should reply: “You miss the point altogether; not in so far as they occurred, and were causes that led up to present events, not in so far as they were real causes at all, but in so far as they can never occur again, are those past events now viewed as irrevocable.” Yet to say, “Those past events can never occur again,” is to utter an objective truth, unless indeed all our human view of time is false. But how can the mere truth that an event can never occur again be a cause at all? Still more, how can it cause me to have ideas of itself? What, once more, does the irrevocableness of the past do to me when I think of it? Or do you say, “Our idea of the irrevocable character of the past is in truth only a sort of generalization from our many experiences of physically irrevocable happenings, such as the breaking of china, the spilling of milk, the flight of youth, and all the other proverbial instances of the past that return not”? Then I answer: If our idea that the past is wholly irrevocable were the result of such