ABSOLUTE PAST AND FUTURE 47 



But we need not quarrel if the Now lines are merely 

 reference lines drawn across the world for convenience 

 in locating events — like the lines of latitude and longi- 

 tude on the earth. There is then no question of a right 

 way and a wrong way of drawing the lines; we draw 

 them as best suits our convenience. World-wide instants 

 are not natural cleavage planes of time; there is nothing 

 equivalent to them in the absolute structure of the world; 

 they are imaginary partitions which we find it con- 

 venient to adopt. 



We have been accustomed to regard the world — the 

 enduring world — as stratified into a succession of in- 

 stantaneous states. But an observer on another star 

 would make the strata run in a different direction from 

 ours. We shall see more clearly the real mechanism of 

 the physical world if we can rid our minds of this 

 illusion of stratification. The world that then stands 

 revealed, though strangely unfamiliar, is actually much 

 simpler. There is a difference between simplicity and 

 familiarity. A pig may be most familiar to us in the 

 form of rashers, but the unstratified pig is a simpler 

 object to the biologist who wishes to understand how 

 the animal functions. 



Absolute Past and Future. Let us now try to attain this 

 absolute view. We rub out all the Now lines. We rub 

 out Yourself and Myself, since we are no longer 

 essential to the world. But the Seen-Now lines are left. 

 They are absolute, since all observers from Here-Now 

 agree about them. The flat picture is a section; you 

 must imagine it rotated (twice rotated in fact, since 

 there are two more dimensions outside the picture). The 

 Seen-Now locus is thus really a cone ; or by taking account 

 of the prolongation of the lines into the future a double 



