MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 21 



ance such as is not usually to be found among meta- 

 physicians. 



III. TIME 



The unreality of time is a cardinal doctrine of many 

 metaphysical systems, often nominally based, as already 

 by Parmenides, upon logical arguments, but originally 

 derived, at any rate in the founders of new systems, from 

 the certainty which is born in the moment of mystic 

 insight. As a Persian Sufi poet says : 



" Past and future are what veil God from our sight. 

 Burn up both of them with fire I How long 

 Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments as a reed ? " l 



The belief that what is ultimately real must be im- 

 mutable is a very common one : it gave rise to the meta- 

 physical notion of substance, and finds, even now, a 

 wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific doctrines 

 as the conservation of energy and mass. 



It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in 

 this view. The arguments for the contention that time 

 is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I 

 think, be regarded as fallacious. Nevertheless there is 

 some sense easier to feel than to state in which time 

 is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. 

 Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as 

 the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to 

 time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance 

 of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in 

 relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer 

 image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing 

 things as entering into the stream of time from an 

 eternal world outside, than from a view which regards 

 time as the devouring tyrant of all that is Both in 



1 Whinfield's translation of the Masnavi (Trubner, 1887), p. 34. 

 G 



