CHAP. III.]

INITIAL ASSUMPTIONS

49

latter, moreover, covers an enormously wide field which we cannot here attempt even to delimit. Our efforts must be strictly circumscribed. Our aim is to arrive at the metaphysical significance with regard to man of certain recognised facts in the physical universe, to ascertain what relation they bear not to the scientific aspect of that universe, to space and time and the intellect of man, but to the Ground and Source of his being and of theirs. This is the work of that branch of metaphysics known as

Religious Philosophy. To enter upon it

as we are doing directly from scientific considerations, is to necessitate certain initial assumptions:

(1) That the universe of being, as Science knows it, has a Ground and Source beyond itself, transcending therefore space and time ;

(2) That the human mind is so constituted that it is able to some extent to apprehend this Ground and Source, consequently itself also partially to transcend space and time.

Under the second head we may remark that this capacity in man for transcending

D

50

MAN'S PARTIAL MASTERY

[CHAP.

space and time is a matter of common, everyday experience. Memory oversteps these limits; imagination does so; sympathy does so; abstract thought does so. The old man who "lives in the past," the young man who "lives in the future," the mother who lives in the lives of her (perhaps absent) children, the scholar or the mathematician who in abstruse study or calculation loses the sense of duration and of material surroundings, these each and all mentally transcend time and space. Physically they are bound-in mind they are free.

There is another and more fundamental illustration of the same truth. Man's power of blending his experience into a whole implies the power of partially transcending time. Were he indeed altogether limited by it, he could be conscious only of succession, one thing after another, one event after another, one experience after another; he could not unite all those events and experiences into one, and make of them My life." That he can and does do so is evidence that though he cannot remove his life out of time he is yet greater than time, and not altogether under its com

66

III.]

OVER SPACE AND TIME

51

pulsion. Again that man can be conscious of a whole in history, in the history of his own race, and in that of the Cosmos, is due to the same time-transcending power. Similar remarks apply in their measure to space. That man can perceive not the mere fact of juxtaposition, but the blending of many juxtapositions into a whole, that space is to him unifying, shows that he bends it (mentally) to his own purposes. It is not his master. And for our present purpose it matters nothing how, through what stages of temporal development, man acquires this unifying peculiarity of his mental constitution. The central fact for Philosophy is that he possesses it: that whatever physical and psychological processes, discovered and classified by Science, have from her point of view brought about this result, the result is there and is significant.

A further important point to notice in the present connection is that in unifying we also distinguish, as is shown by our always setting our present life, the life which we are living at the moment, over against a larger and more comprehensive life, in which that moment is included, yet from

52

CONTRASTS UNDERLYING

[CHAP.

which it is distinct. We do this in four

ways:

(1) In regard of any present moment in our individual life, such moment standing out over against, yet as part of the whole into which the past, present and future of that individual life are combined;

(2) In regard of our whole individual life, as contrasted with the life of our

social environment and the life of mankind in general;

(3) In regard of the life of mankind in general (of which our own is a constituent part), as contrasted with the whole cosmic process as we know it;

(4) In regard of that cosmic process itself, the whole visible temporal order of things (more or less crudely conceived according to the stage of intellectual culture and development attained,) as contrasted with an eternal, invisible order which conditions and transcends, while it includes, the temporal.

It is hardly necessary to observe that we

III.]

HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

53

are not always giving attention to these contrasts. They are often outside the actual field of consciousness, lying as it were latent in our minds, yet ever there, ready at any moment to spring into full view, always more or less affecting, though it may be unconsciously, our mental attitude at any given moment. The very fact, so often insisted upon by ethical and religious teachers, of the transitory nature of all earthly experience, is only intelligible to them and to us because contrasted with a sense of abidingness equally present. We should not know that "the world passeth away," unless we were conscious that something, not the world, "abideth for ever."

The time-transcending capacity in man has been thus insisted upon, because the conception we form of our relation to time and to eternity must very largely affect our idea of individual human life. If we regard the latter as being now wholly subordinated to temporal conditions, we place an enormous difficulty in the way of any reasonable belief in its persistence after death, a difficulty which, were it real, would need to be candidly allowed and seriously confronted.