Temporal good

“ Plainly we have here a question that is of great importance for any understanding of the categories of experience. It belongs, then, in the context of these earlier discussions of our present series of lectures. Moreover, it is one that will constantly meet us later. The relation of Time to Nature will be of central concern to us. When we come to deal with the individual Self, we shall again have to face the question: In what sense has the Self of the individual a purely Temporal, and in what sense an Eternal type of reality? ”

“ As, in this life, consciousness is interrupted by sleep and by accidents, so the temporal processes, in whatever variety they have, which fulfil in their wholeness and in their relations to the eternal order the life of an individual, may be, for all that I can see, in any one of a large number of relations to us and to one another, — contemporaneous, continuously successive, or discontinuously successive, with temporal gaps of any magnitude. ”

“ But no series of experiences upon which attention is fixed is wholly indifferent to us; and the temporal aspect of such series always involves some element of expectancy and some sense of something that no longer is; and both these conscious attitudes color our interest in the presented succession, and give the whole the meaning of life. Time is thus indeed the form of practical activity ”

“ Now for our theory, that is precisely the way in which the eternal consciousness views the temporal order, — not ignoring one jot or tittle of its sharp distinctions of past or of future, of succession or of duration, — but still viewing the whole time-process as the expression of a single Internal Meaning. What we now call past and future are not merely the same for God; and, nevertheless, they are viewed at once, precisely as the beginning and the end of the rhythm are not the same for our experience, but are yet at once seen as belonging to one and the same whole succession. ”

“ For, as a fact, in defining time we have already, and inevitably, defined eternity; and a temporal world must needs be, when viewed in its wholeness, an eternal world. We have only to review the structure of Reality in the light of the foregoing analysis in order to bring to our consciousness this result.
And so, first, the real world of our Idealism has to be viewed by us men as a temporal order. ”

“ And we must not think to tie a knot in Time, and thus to make the consummation temporal or eternal. The consummation is timeless, and we belong to Time, in our process of living.
Only Matter is a very slow flux, the waves ebbing slowly apart. ”

“ Our brief, but still by no means indefinitely small time-span of consciousness, determines in this way our whole human form of experience, and of course limits the ethical meaning of our conduct. Yet how long a temporal period, how much duration, shall constitute the finite interval viewed by a given form of consciousness as a now, is a wholly arbitrary matter, so long as now means not the ideal mathematical now, — the negation of all duration, the mere point between present and future, but rather a period, a succession of events, a finite duration. ”

“ That which is more than an event must also, from another side, exist, and must thus appear in, or as, one member of the temporal series. But, so far as it transcends time, it is ideal, and, as such, is not fact. ”

“ And who dares to teach man, created in the image of God, that the daily duty appointed to him—duty to himself, his family, his country, and his race—serves but temporal ends? If neglected, are only temporal ends frustrated? When our Father sends us what fills our hearts with food and gladness, is He working nought but temporal ends? ”

“ 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, “the present instant,” so-called, has at once temporal succession, the earlier and the later, included within it, and it has a decidedly, and, in fact, a very inconveniently and arbitrarily, limited length. ”

“ All people have to live in this temporal world; they eat temporal food, wear temporal clothing, live in temporal houses, have temporal horses, oxen, farms, etc., and if they have families they are temporal ones. ”

“ Our view declares that all the life of the world, and therefore all temporal sequences, are present at once to the Absolute. Our view also maintains that, without the least conflict with this sense in which the whole temporal order is known at once to the Absolute, there is another sense in which any portion of the temporal sequence of the world may be taken as present, when viewed with reference to the experience of any finite Self whose present it is, and when contrasted with what for this same point of view is the past and the future of the world. ”

“ I have never yet found any one who can draw the dividing line between our spiritual and temporal interests, neither do I expect to. I believe that it is quite as necessary that we should attend to the temporal, as it is to attend to the spiritual duties which devolve upon us, and vice versa. It will not do to devote all our time to the spiritual part, nor all to the temporal alone. ”

“ And our interest in life means our conscious concern in passing on from any temporal present towards its richer fulfilment, or away from its relative insignificance. Now that Direction of temporal succession of which I before made mention, has the most intimate relations to this our interest in our experience. ”

“ Who can say, I shall see spring again? Yet the lesson thus taught us is for our good. Time moves on and brings us to eternity; therefore, is it not well for man that Nature warns him of the lapse of Time? ”

“ And this process is forced on it, both by its temporal form, and again by the continuity of its content, which transcends what is given. Time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but to be a contradictory appearance. ”

“ In that perfect whole our moral ideals and moral effort, as finite beings belonging to the temporal order, are of course included along with everything else, and its perfection is therefore no ground for treating them as nugatory. Our own moral struggle with the apparent evil of the time-series is itself an integral part of the Reality which, in its complete individual character, is already perfect, if we could but win to a point of view from which to behold it as it is. ”

“ One of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the defects of the present time is an inordinate care for temporal and material things. {155} How shall we live? what shall we eat? wherewithal shall we be clothed?—these are the questions which men are all too much exercised about at the present day. ”

“ What is directly yielded to our knowledge by sense-awareness is a duration. Accordingly we have now to explain how moments are derived from durations, and also to explain the purpose served by their introduction.
A moment is a limit to which we approach as we confine attention to durations of minimum extension. Natural relations among the ingredients of a duration gain in complexity as we consider durations of increasing temporal extension. Accordingly there is an approach to ideal simplicity as we approach an ideal diminution of extension. ”

“ This is the time frame in which every form of desire can be fulfilled, as everything is under the heavens. Every change and transformation that occurs is connected to both the good and the sinner, based on how each individual prepared themselves. ”

“ She looked on a neat little world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow in search paying.... ”

“ We inhabit temporal bodies, we eat temporal food, we build temporal houses, we raise temporal cattle and temporal wheat; we contend with temporal weeds, and with temporal enemies in our soil, and these things naturally give rise to the necessity of attending to and performing many duties of a temporal and arduous nature, and they, of course, are embraced in our religion. ”

“ But, on the other hand, even to assert this is to assert that the future, and in fact all the future, in all its individual detail, belongs to reality, and forms part of its wholeness. To admit this is to admit that the true insight, and the divine will, require, and get, the endless whole of future time, as well as of past time, before them in one, not timeless, but time-inclusive survey, which embraces the whole of real life. ”

“ To my mind, therefore, time, as the form of the will, is (in so far as we can undertake to define at all the detailed structure of finite reality) to be viewed as the most pervasive form of all finite experience, whether human or extra-human. In pursuing its goals, the Self lives in time. ”

“ But the temporal form seems inseparable from finite intelligence. For the limitation of my existence to a certain portion of time is clearly simply the abstract and external aspect of the fact that my interests and purposes, so far as I can apprehend the meaning of my own life, occupy just this special place in the logical development of the larger whole of social life and purpose of which my own life is a member. ”

“ Once more it seemed to be that time when all is vivid, when every day may be the turning-point of life—the time that was consciously but a drift and floating on of hour by hour when it existed, as is the present moment—but which, looking back upon it, seemed the time of free action, of choice, of every possibility. ”

“ The whole of time will contain a single expression of the divine Will, and therefore, despite its endlessness, the time-world will be present as such a single whole to the Absolute whose Will this is, and whose life all this sequence embodies. ”

“ We wish at present rather to look back into past time and see what consequences we may legitimately infer. Such intervals of time as we are familiar with in ordinary life, or even in ordinary history, are for our present purpose quite inappreciable. ”

“ Hence, too, the human, and this also is true of every mundane soul, uses periods and restitutions of its proper life. For, in consequence of being measured by time, it energizes transitively, and possesses a proper motion. But every thing which is moved perpetually and participates of time, revolves periodically and proceeds from the same to the same. ”

“ Free-Will. "Time is but a relative mode of regarding things." "Events may, in some sense, exist always, both past and future." Time like a moving-picture reel, containing the future scene at the present moment, though out of sight. Analogy of dream-time. An Absolute Consciousness in which past, present and future exist as a single perception. A glimpse of a transcendental truth. How to acquire the faculty of Future-Clairvoyance. ”

“ The lapse of time has enabled the system to be evolved by the gradual but constant accretions of human thought, from generation to generation, until it has grown, from the first vague hope of the human soul for a life beyond the grave, to its present stupendous proportions. ”

“ Thus it is that when we stretch our view through immense vistas of time past, or when we look forward through immeasurable ages of time to come, the alteration in the length of the day will assume the most startling proportions, and involve the most momentous consequences. ”

“ Let us therefore see, O human soul, whether present time can be long; for to thee is it given to perceive and to measure periods of time. What wilt thou reply to me? Is a hundred years when present a long time? ”

“ And if time is so fundamental that an understanding of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between determination and free will. ”

“ I have dwelt long upon the time consciousness of our relatively direct experience, because here lies the basis for every deeper comprehension of the metaphysics both of time and of eternity. Our ordinary conception of time as an universal form of existence in the external world, is altogether founded upon a generalization, whose origin is in us men largely and obviously social, but whose materials are derived from our inner experience of the succession of significant events. ”

“ Time, say certain philosophers, is the measure [Pg 295] of a man's ideas marching along in uniform procession. But I hold they are wrong. Time is nothing of the sort; else had time stopped as I hung panting over the pole in the beaver lodge; for one idea and one only, beat and beat and beat to the pulsing of the blood that throbbed through my brain—"I am safe—I am safe—I am safe!" ”

“ Time rolled on, and the majestic order of nature, uninterrupted in its harmonious course, finely contrasted the rapid vicissitudes of human events, and the countless changes in human institutions! In the short space of twenty years, the mighty had fallen, and the lowly were elevated ”

“ Not to the present is our hour confined,
The great and shadowy future is assigned
To be the glorious empire of the mind.
The past was once the future, and it wrought
In the high presence of on-looking thought;
All that we have, was by its efforts brought.
To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
Make for the future—certain is to be. ”

“ This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. ”