Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/164

Rh consciousness which observes the whole succession as a whole, is equally true. The term present, as we saw, is naturally used both to name the temporally present when it is opposed to whatever precedes or succeeds this present, and also to name the observed facts of a succession in so far as they are experienced as constituting one whole succession. In so far the term is indeed ambiguous. But even this ambiguity itself is due to the before-mentioned fact that, if you try to find an absolutely simple present temporal fact of consciousness, and still to view it as an event in time, you are still always led, in the World of Description, to observe or to conceive that this temporal fact is a complex event, having a true succession within itself. So that the now of temporal expression is never a mere now, unless indeed it be viewed either as the ideal mathematical instant within which nothing takes place, or else as one of the finally simple stages of the discrete series of facts which the absolute insight views as the expression of its Will.

As to the one hypothesis, an absolute instant in the mathematical sense is like a point, an ideal limit, and never appears as any isolated fact of temporal experience. Every now within which something happens is therefore also a succession; so that every temporal fact, every event, so far as we men can observe it, has to be viewed as present to experience in both the senses of the term present; since this fact when present may be contrasted with predecessors that are no longer and with successors that are not yet, while this same fact, when taken as an event occupying time, is viewed as a presented succession with former and latter members contained within it.