Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/429

410 aspect of the being in question that we regard as a very real aspect. The assertion, The soul is immortal, is again an assertion about the supposed real Being of the soul. It has a reference to the present Being of this soul, yet it is ipso facto an assertion about the future. And common sense asks the question, Do you believe that there is a future life? Plainly all such expressions regard future Being as a reality, and inseparable from the present.

Yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, the past, the present, the future, and all the ages, thus enter the realm of conceived temporal Being together. So surely as time is, they all alike are. Their sequence is the actuality of the temporal order. Ignorant as you are of the detailed facts of any of them, you still have to say that temporal Being, in its wholeness, has to be conceived as logically coherent, and is not without all of them alike. If the future is for you uncertain, much of what you regard as the present is uncertain also, and the same is true of the past. These three sorts of Being, then, are not to be sundered. They are merely distinguishable aspects of one conception. The illusion that they are separable arises only when you neglect both their continuity, and that coherence of meaning which forces you constantly to see in the lines of your friend’s face his past reflected, in your own memories your very self expressed, and in your future the continuation and expression of the present Being of your will. And once more this temporal unity applies to the whole of nature. In one time all events are conceived as occurring.

As to possible, or valid, Being, — we already saw, in our former discussion, how impossible it is to separate