Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/428

Rh region of that very whole of temporal existence in which alone the present itself has any comprehensible place or even any conceivable Being. Nor can any fact of nature, however remote from us it now seems, be viewed by us as real without being caught in the net of this universal time-order.

But just so the future, not, indeed, when viewed as to its unknown details, but when conceived as the region into which the present is passing away, when regarded as containing the goal of all our hopes, and the decision of all our cherished interests and destinies, — is not this future so bound up in one world of Being with the present, that, if we could indeed abstract from future Being, present Being would again lose not only all of its practical interest, but also a large part of its theoretical meaning? Observe any object that you please, in a world of time and change, and the question, What is it? is in fact logically and inseparably bound up with the two questions, What was it? and Whither is it tending? Consider so abstract an object as the position of a material particle in space, as studied in dynamics. That position so studied becomes at once a place in a path, meaningless except as viewed with reference to the past and future positions of the particle under the system of forces acting upon it. For the theory of heat, the present temperature of a cooling body, is a state in a series of past and future states, determined by the laws of the conduction of heat. And in human affairs, just as present history is an outcome of former ages, precisely so it is a prelude to a future. And when we say that a youth, or a nation, has a future, has a destiny, we refer to an