Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/427

408 but even for your very meaning. This city exists for you only as the recognized city, that is familiar to you because it has long been here. In itself, apart from just your private recognition, it is what it has become. It is the outcome of former stages of its existence. This University is the living presence, in newly developed and growing form, of its own historic past. That is what the present University means. Its present is inseparable from its past. You too are yourself because at this instant you relate yourself to your own past. The meaning of the past is a necessity, if you are to give to your present any rational meaning. Nor is this true alone of your knowledge about yourself. It is true of the very Being that you attribute to your present facts. However rapidly any Being grows, its very growth means relation to its own earlier Being. And no recondite discussion of the supposed permanence of substance is in the least needed to remind you, even if you wholly abstract from the traditional doctrines of substance, that whatever novelties the present may contain, these very novelties get their character, both for you, and for any one to whom they are real at all, by virtue of their relation to past beings and events, so that if, per impossibile, the whole past of temporal Being were absolutely stricken out, the present, which would then involve no historical relations to the foregoing, no entrance of novelty into the old order, no growth, no decay, no endurance, and no continuance of a former process in new forms, would simply lose every element that now gives it rational coherence.

Far then from being merely contrasted with present Reality, past Reality, viewed in general, is a correlated