452 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



embraces the whole universe, ourselves included, does not really 

 involve a repetition of the events in reverse order, but only a 

 second way of reviewing the past history of the world. 



These considerations do not seem altogether unfruitful. They 

 emphasise the distinction between true and quasi- dynamical laws* 

 they clear our thoughts with reference to the relation of cause and 

 effect, and, above all, they help to dispel from our minds the 

 prevalent error that time has an existence in itself independently 

 of the particular time -relations that prevail between the thoughts 

 that really occupy our mind, or between events 1 that actually occur 

 in the universe about us, or between those events and our thoughts. 

 In reality, the aggregate of these individual time-relations is the 

 whole of what exists in nature as a background for our conceptions 

 about time. 



1 Thoughts in other people's minds are some of the events that occur in the 

 universe about us ; that is, in the rest of the universe, excluding ourselves. 



