Moreover, the view that in order to be object of a given idea, the object must be cause of the idea, or that ideas have to look to their own causes as their objects, is refuted, as a general definition, by a glance at the nature of all those temporal objects of which we have ideas, but which are not now present in time. Is anything in the future, say my own death, or an eclipse due next year, or futurity in general, the cause of my present ideas, true or false, that refer to any such object. When I form a plan, or sign a contract, the hypothetical future event defined by the plan or contemplated in the contract is said, in the familiar Aristotelian phraseology, to be the final cause of the present act, but it certainly is not a cause impressing itself upon knowledge as the seal imprints its form upon the wax. Yet Aristotle, to whom final causation meant at bottom everything, also loves far too much the trivial seal and wax metaphor as his customary means for defining the general relations of object and idea; so much deeper was Aristotle’s thought than his phraseology! Even the Nous of Aristotle knows through some sort of so-called touching of its intelligible objects.
But if one attempts to escape from these just-mentioned considerations about the future objects of present ideas, by declaring that the future has as yet no real Being at all, and that it therefore is no real, but only an imagined, object of present ideas, I should, indeed, not in the least accept the objection as valid, but I should for the moment only ask the objector what he thinks about the whole realm of past Being. The most noticeable feature of the past is that it is irrevocable. This character of the past, viz., that it is gone beyond recall, is regarded
