HUMAN IMMORTALITY 3OI 



plete and also infinite, and cannot be conscious of it 

 except with these characters, — which shows that it 

 cannot have come to us by transfer or communica- 

 tion. For if it did come in this way, then, in the 

 first place, it must have a history, and a limit of 

 history to date, quite as all else that comes so has; 

 and this would mean that it must be thought as finite 

 in quantity, as well as an incomplete unity capable of 

 increase. And, in the second place, its coming in 

 this heroic fashion is itself unstatable and unthink- 

 able, except in terms of Time itself ; and this shows 

 that the pretended empirical explanation requires the 

 preemployment of the thing whose origin it would 

 clear up, — all the light the explanation gives, it 

 borrows from the very thing it j^retends to explain. 



Time is therefore inevitably brought home to the 

 soul as its real source, and our convinced judgment 

 confesses the consciousness of Time to be a con- 

 sciousness a priori ; that is, an act oi the soul, of the 

 individual mind, in the spontaneous unity of its exist- 

 ence. It is seen to be a changeless principle of 

 relation, by which the active-conscious self connects 

 the items of experience into the serial order which 

 we call sequence or succession, and blends the two 

 concomitant series, physical and psychic, into the 

 single whole that expresses the self's own unity. 



So a sufficiently strict interpretation of the mod- 

 ern psychological doctrine, instead of merely making 



