300 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



beyond the dead fact of their concomitancy ! But 

 ivhy not? Surely the concomitance of the two is 

 in Time, and conditioned by Time ; that at least is 

 indisputable, is involved in calling the relation con- 

 comitance. If it can be shown, now, that Time is no 

 " thing-in-itself," no thing existing of itself indepen- 

 dently of minds, but must be explained as a peculiar 

 form of consciousness, in each of us, that cannot be 

 conceived of as derived from any possible communi- 

 cation ab extra, and consequently must be acknow- 

 ledged as the expression of our mental self-activity, 

 we shall clearly have connected our empirical con- 

 sciousness, our varying flood of serial experiences, 

 our states of mind, with our active unit-being, and 

 shall have lodged this our active identity in the 

 eternal world, or order, in the only sense in which 

 such an order of existence can be made intelligible. 

 I must not delay you with prolonged or intricate 

 proofs that the real nature of Time is such as I have 

 described, though such proofs are indeed numerous 

 and prolific. It is enough for our purposes to-night 

 to call attention, first, to the simple fact that we can- 

 not rationally entertain the proposition that there is, 

 or can be, no Time, — which shows that the con- 

 sciousness of Time is inseparable from our essential 

 being ; in other words, is intrinsic in it. Secondly, 

 let us attend to the more significant fact, that we are 

 conscious of Time as a unity at once absolutely com- 



