they seem to have to transform the values of the earlier stages. Even supposing that he has justified us in regarding the quality of the later stages as more important than that of the earlier, he has done nothing to validate our belief that later good makes up for earlier evil, and later evil spoils earlier good: he has not shown how it is possible that the quality of one stage should fix the value of the whole preceding life. For this compensatory function of the later stages the only explanation that we have yet found is that furnished by our conception of the individual human life as a whole that more and more comes to be.
Let us now gather up the threads of our discussion. We began by asking how we must conceive the relation of the individual life to the time-process in order to justify our belief in the supreme importance of its later stages. We showed in the first place that the order and the irreversibility of the time-process must be accepted as real. Next we made the assertion—to be defended later—that the reality of change must also be affirmed. At this point it seemed necessary to explain what we meant by asserting the reality of change, and in particular to define our position with reference to the problem of the existence or non-existence of past events. In considering this problem we limited ourselves to the life of the human individual. And the theory that we tried to develop is that the past of such a life is not altogether non-existent: it lives to some extent in memory; it lives still more completely in the influence of the earlier upon the later; it lives most truly of all in the sense that this later is what it has become and that thus it is held in solution, as it were, in this later.[1] And it is this third aspect of the continued existence
- ↑ If any one thinks that he finds in this conception some resemblance to a certain view of Bergson's I shall not try to dispute the point. I shall only say that if I have been influenced here by the doctrine of the French philosopher I have been influenced unconsciously, and that I have been led to my opinion by considerations quite other than those that seem to have moved him. Furthermore, the difference between my conception and hie seems to me at least as great as the resemblance. I have tried to show that in the life of the human individual the earlier stages must in some way be preserved in the later, and that this preservation is something more than that which is afforded by memory or by the influence of the earlier stages upon those that follow them. Precisely what this 'more' is it is not indeed easy to say, and I must plead guilty to the charge of being rather vague upon this point. But I cannot see that we should gain anything by appealing to the conception of 'unconscious memory.' About all that we can say is that the preservation of the earlier stages is a corollary of the fact that there are beings whose nature is essentially temporal, whose wholeness is something that comes to be. Aside from the fact that I do not follow Bergson in appealing to the conception of unconscious memory, there is the further difference that my theory involves not only the preservation of the earlier stages by the later, but also the fixing of their value. The conception that I am trying to develop is something other than the mere notion of cumulation. The preservation of the past, whether through unconscious memory or by other means, is only a part of the matter; the transmuting of the value of the past is of equal or greater importance.
