ances in us of a timeless act, which involves the timeless, therefore, in the phenomenal world, eternal existence (pre-, and post-immortality) of every individual, and which completely fails to explain the possibility of moral progress.
What is true is that change would have no meaning without a permanent which, relatively at least, does not change, but whose modes or conditions change. “All that changes is permanent, and only the condition thereof changes”; “Permanence is. in fact, just another expression for time, as the abiding correlate of all existence of phenomena, and of all changes, and of all coexistence. For change does not affect time itself, but only the phenomena in time.” “If we were to attribute succession to time itself, we should be obliged to cogitate another time, in which the succession would be possible.” Kant is speaking of the phenomenal world, but we must transfer it to the world of reality; and by time he means the whole time, as a background against which events take place, so that change is only in the latter. The question is thus raised whether it is the moments of time itself that are successive, or whether only the events in it. It is at this point that Lotze attacks the question, in further developing Kant’s theory of time; until he wrote, the theory remained practically untouched, though the difficulties inherent in the popular view of time were fully dwelt upon by Herbart.
Our ordinary notions of time, Lotze points out, are largely derived from space-images; we speak of it as a line, extending infinitely in two directions, or again as a stream flowing from the past to the future, or from the future to the past. These notions are defective, for every point of a line has the same reality, whereas in time only one point has properly reality, the reality of the past being different alike from that of the present and from that of the future; even the reality of the one point, the “present,” is in a state of change. Again, the notion of a stream involves that of a source, of an end, of a bed within which the stream flows, so that we seem to think of time as something that has had a beginning, and may have an end, and which requires a background in contrast with which it is thought of as flowing. But when we are speaking of empty time, this is inconsistent. In the same way we cannot call it a series (in which all the members have equal reality, as where we may with the same legitimacy proceed from n to n-1 as to n+1), nor a process, for there is nothing that develops or that is in process. We are referred therefore to the content of time, for an explanation of the reality which we are to attribute to it. But here time seems wholly useless, for by no possibility can we think of the passage of time as having an influence upon
