And so with Time. Time is a matter of individual memory, of remembering past events and of anticipating (which is memory reversed, as it were; memory projected) events to come. And memory, as we know it, is purely a matter of this or that sort of nerve-substance in the brain. Had we no memory, we should know nothing whatsoever of time; an event would be a point, and no past point could be recalled, nor any future one conjectured. So, could an infinite number of memories coalesce, there would be no time either, for in that case all events would occur here and now.
Nature—the Cosmos—the All—the Deity ... He is not limited by cubical contents nor by clocks striking the hours.
§ 25
How convey a notion of this mysterious Unity? Shall we essay a gross and inadequate analogy?
There are in the blood of man little things called white corpuscles. They are alive; they are, in fact, little living personages. Indeed, it would be hard to deny that they possess a certain sort of "intelligence"; for, according to the phagocytic theory, they attack their foes and help their friends. Now, if these white corpuscles ever reason about the world which they inhabit, they must think that it consists of an immense red ocean in a perpetual flux, limitless and restless, and peopled with myriads of beings like unto themselves. Yet they are an integral part of the human frame; indeed without them the human frame could not be what it is. Well, man's place in his universe may be very similar to that of the white corpuscle in its; and the intelligence and nature of the Being of which man forms an integral part may be as inconceivable to man—to bewildered man, buried 'neath an ocean of air, and blown about space without even a "by your leave"—as are man's to the leucocytes of the blood.
If there is no such thing as Space objectively existing outside our groping human selves; and if there is no such thing as Time, also objectively existing independent of our remembering and anticipating human selves; if also Death is but Life undergoing Change (for Life is not a thing extraneous to the cosmos, and there is nothing in the cosmos that can ever go out of it); if even Change itself is but a process so named because of the necessities of our temporal and spatial conditions; and what we call "multiplicity" or "manifoldness" merely a word coined by our incompetence to perceive the interdependence of all that is ... why, then, surely, one with and interpenetrating our own little space-bound, time-fettered lives, there must be an Absolute Life, indiscerptible because coherent; immutable, because unspatial; inexorable, because timeless; not to be gainsaid, because all-embracing; whose behests the human spirit, because identical with and contained in it, must and cannot but obey.
§ 26
However, that there is a flaw in my Philosophy and a flaw in my Creed, I do not conceal from myself.—If, underlying and upholding all phenomenal multiplicity, there is a noumenal unity, how it comes about that there is evil and suffering and injustice and pain I do not know. Nor do I know how, if that Unity (including man) is governed by infrangible law, it comes about that we obtain notions of Responsibility and Will; how we feel that we ought to act thus and not otherwise, and have the power to choose the good from the evil.
Yet I comfort myself thus:—Human reason, after all, is inadequate for the explanation of anything superhuman. But there may be in man a faculty of imagination or feeling or emotion or faith—call it what you like—that insists upon our trying to act thus and not otherwise; upon our helping on the good and eradicating the bad; and that leaves the problem of the Origin of Evil and the problem of the Freedom of the Will to another sphere and another stage in the upward emergence of mind.