Religion and Psychology 323 



feeling of timelessness, it is quite conceivable that we are passing 

 beyond the hmits of time, and proving, to ourselves at any rate, that 

 time is appearance and not reahty, and that immortality is not some- 

 thing we have to wait for at the end of this life, but something we 

 can and do achieve in varying degrees while still living this life. 

 That has been the view of leading philosophers throughout the 

 ages. We find Aristotle urging his readers, e(p' octov evSej^srai 

 aOavaTiJ^stv, to be immortal as far as possible, even in this life. 



Thus we come to the tremendous metaphysical problem of the 

 reality of time, which is, perhaps, the greatest metaphysical problem 

 of the present day, and especially important to our point of view of 

 personality. So long as we consider time as one of the conditions 

 of individual experience, we are tied down to a certain theory of 

 personality, which may easily be the wrong one. All psychological 

 theories of personality, of course, are of this nature, and, to a great 

 extent, they are for that reason rather depressing, because they 

 emphasise the limits that we are all aware of. But in emphasising 

 these limits they tend to make them much more complete and 

 ultimate than they really are for us. Again, if we take physio- 

 logical modes of thought in considering psychological problems, we 

 are impressed by rates of rhythm of physiological processes. As 

 physiological psychologists we may be impressed by experiments 

 which show that estimation of time is most accurate with a certain 

 rhythm and less accurate with shorter or longer rhythms, or again, 

 that experience of succession has a lower limit of causation. In 

 the background there may be the unspoken but fallacious assump- 

 tion that the experience of succession is the same as, or at least 

 runs parallel with, a succession of experiences ; and again the 

 further assumption that a succession of experiences runs parallel 

 with a succession of physiological changes somewhere or other in 

 the organism. It is easy to show by metaphysical argument that 

 the conception of time as something ultimately real leads us to 

 definite antinomies or contradictions, from which we cannot 

 escape unless we agree to regard time as appearance and not reality. 

 But we still find it extremely difficult to understand most aspects 

 of experience, unless we do regard time as real. If we consider 

 experience in detail, we see how much time contributes to the 

 quality of that experience. So impressed was Bergson by this fact 

 that he has taken time as the very stuff of which reality is made. 

 He speaks of duree rielle as something which is ultimate, although 



