It will now be my task to find the common origin of these two factors of the mind.
Let us take as a starting-point what we were able to lay down as to the universality of the memory of great men. To such everything is equally real: what took place long ago and the most recent experience. Thus it happens that a single experience does not end with the moment of time in which it happened, does not disappear as this moment of time disappears, but through the memory is wrested from the grasp of time. Memory makes experience timeless; the essence of it is that it should transcend time. A man can only remember the past because memory is free from the control of time, because events which in nature are functions of time, in the spirit have conquered time.
But here a difficulty crops up. How can memory be a negation of time if, on the other hand, it is certain that if we had no memory we should be unconscious of time? It is certainly true that we shall always be conscious of the passing of time by our memory of the past. If the two are in so intimate a relation how can the one be the negation of the other?
The difficulty is easy to resolve. It is just because a living creature—not necessarily a human being—by being endowed with memory is not wholly absorbed by the experiences of the moment that it can, so to speak, oppose itself to time, take cognisance of it, and make it the subject of observation. Were the being wholly abandoned to the experience of the moment and not saved from it by memory then it would change with time and be a floating bubble in the stream of events; it could never be conscious of time, for consciousness implies duality. The mind must have transcended time to grasp it, it must have stood outside it in order to be able to reflect upon it. This does not apply merely to special moments of time, as, for instance, to the case that we cannot be conscious of sorrow until the sorrow is over, but it is a part of the conception of time. If we could not free ourselves from time, we could have no knowledge of time.
