THE DIRECT JUSTIFICATION OF ENTELECHY 331 



make the " Temporal ' in any form a constituent of what 

 we have called " ideal nature " or not. Ideal nature only 

 " is >: in the sense of an eternal, i.e. timeless, validity ; it 

 is the non-historical. The Temporal so it seems cannot 

 have a place in this ideal world. Time is said to be 

 properly a subjective phenomenon in the strictest sense ; 

 time seems to be, if you will allow me to say so, still 

 " more " unreal than space is. But, on the other hand, 

 there is nothing more " real " to immediate self-experience 

 than duration ; memory, the prerequisite of all experience, 

 nay, of all knowing, ordinary and scientific, demands dura- 

 tion. Without the duration of my Ego, I might perhaps 

 be conscious of single " Givennesses " in space, but they 

 would be lacking in connexion ; there would not be one 

 Givenness, there would be a permanent forgetting : no 

 change, no movement, no past and future only the 

 present. And there would also be no morphogenesis and 

 no acting : there would only be stages, but, since stage 

 A would be forgotten when stage B arrived, there would 

 be no connexion between the stages. 



But my Ego does endure, and I do conceive change and 

 movement and morphogenesis and action my own and 

 other people's. 



What then is to be preferred : my postulating an 

 absolutely timeless ideal world and looking upon all 

 realisation in time as a merely subjective thing as a sort 

 of imperfection of my conceiving that ideal world or my 

 immediate knowledge of duration, my knowledge of time 

 as the most " real " of all realities ? 



There is no doubt that memory and duration are 

 almost identical. And it is equally true that what, strictly 



