Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/170

Rh to a temporal type of consciousness as one of the simplest of the relations that are of primal importance for the definition of the Absolute. Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order. To view all the course of time just as you then and there view the whole of that sequence, — this is to be possessed of an eternal type of insight.

“But,” so many hereupon object, — “it appears impossible to see how this sort of eternal insight is possible, since just now, in time, the infinite past, — including, say, the geological periods and the Persian invasion of Greece, is no longer, while the future is not yet. How then for God shall this difference of past and future be transcended, and all be seen at once?” I reply, In precisely the same sense all the notes of the melody except this note are not when this note sounds, but are either no longer or not yet. Yet you may know a series of these notes at once. Now precisely so God knows the whole time-sequence of the world at once. The difference is merely one of span. You now exemplify the eternal type of knowledge, even as you listen to any briefest sequence of my words. For you, too, know time even by sharing the image of the Eternal.

Or again, a common wonder appears regarding how the divine knowledge can be in such wise eternal as to suffer no change to occur in it. How God should be unchangeable, yet express His will in a changing world, is an ancient problem. Our doctrine answers the question at a stroke. The knowledge of all change is itself indeed