Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/163

138 from our point of view, occupy icons of the world’s history. Our right to such hypotheses is incontestable, provided only that they help us to conceive the true unity of experience. Nevertheless, in the last analysis, the Absolute Will must be viewed as expressed in a well-ordered and discrete series of facts, which from our point of view may indeed appear, as we shall still further see, capable of discrimination ad infinitum.

But now secondly, and without the least conflict with the foregoing theses, I declare that this same temporal world is, when regarded in its wholeness, an Eternal order. And I mean by this assertion nothing whatever but that the whole real content of this temporal order, whether it is viewed from any one temporal instant as past or as present or as future, is at once known, i.e. is consciously experienced as a whole, by the Absolute. And I use this expression at once in the very sense in which we before used it when we pointed out that to your own consciousness, the whole musical phrase may be and often is known at once, despite the fact that each element of the musical succession, when taken as the temporally present one, excludes from its own temporal instant the other members of the sequence, so that they are either no longer or not yet, at the instant when this element is temporally the present one. As we saw before, it is true that, in one sense, each one of the elements or partial events of a sequence excludes the former and the latter elements from being at the time when this particular element exists. But that, in another and equally obvious and empirical sense, all the members of an actually experienced succession are at once to any