Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/444

Rh bodied in a presented succession of empirical facts.” If you ask, “But how can many different ideal processes be united in the unity of a single idea?” I answer, “That is precisely what in your own way you can observe whenever you think, however fragmentarily, of the various, and often highly contrasting, ideas that occur to your mind when you grasp the meaning of any hypothetical or complex proposition, — such as the present one.” If you ask, “But how can what we men call present and future Being be unified in a single present unity of consciousness?” I reply, “In idea you unify them all, whenever you yourself assert propositions as now true of past, present, and future. In concrete experience, you find a past, a present, a future, unified even in your own passing moments of consciousness, despite their brief span. As you listen to my words, several words come to consciousness at once, and yet as a succession. The first of three words is past when the second sounds, the third is yet to come when the second sounds, yet all are at once for you. Now this totum simul is precisely the character that, within your brief time-span of human consciousness, you can and do now verify. An eternal consciousness is definable as one for which all the facts of the whole time-stream, just so far as time is a final form of consciousness, have the same type of unity that your present momentary consciousness, even now within its little span, surveys. But if for the divine mind, some still more inclusive form takes up our time-stream into a yet larger unity of experience, all the more is what we mean by temporal succession present together for the