Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/439

420 from an absolute point of view. Yet this preliminary unification has its truth.

In particular, however, as to the special features of our view of nature, our human experience of space-relations is obviously so special in its type that this our view of the space-world may be frankly regarded, I think, as something of decidedly limited truth. It is fairly inconceivable that from the point of view of experience in general, our space-form should remain as more than a fragmentary perspective effect, so to speak, or in other words, as more than what one might call a relatively valid finite point of view. The facts which we view as related to one another in space must indeed be viewed by a larger experience than ours, as present and as linked. But our way of interpreting the linkage is obviously human, and is probably only a very special case of the experience of the various aspects of coexistent meaning in the world of the final experience.

In another way, while time as the form of ethically significant process has doubtless a far deeper truth, temporal succession is subject to a perfectly arbitrary limitation of what one may call the time-span of our human consciousness. What we regard as a present instant is neither a truly instantaneous mere Now, having no finite length, nor a duration long enough to enable us to survey at a glance anywhere nearly as considerable a whole of successively realized meaning as we desire for any one of our more rational human purposes, whether thoughtful, or artistic, or practical. Our human time-consciousness is essentially ill adapted for observing the whole of any one of even our most familiar meanings. In other words, for us men,