or at least known.” In this answer the position seems changed, but it is really the same, and it does but lead back to our old dilemma. You cannot, in any sense, know, or perceive, or experience, a term as in relation, unless you have also the other term to which it is related. And, if we will but ponder this, surely it becomes self-evident. Well then, either you have not got any relation of phenomena to anything at all; or else the other term, your thing the Ego, takes its place among the rest. It becomes another event among psychical events.[1]
It would be useless to pursue into its ramifications a view false at the root, and based (as we have seen) on a vicious alternative. That which is more than an event must also, from another side, exist, and must thus appear in, or as, one member of the temporal series. But, so far as it transcends time, it is ideal, and, as such, is not fact. The attempt to take it as existing somehow and somewhere alongside, thrusts it back into the sphere of finite particulars. In this way, with all our struggles, we never rise beyond some world of mere events, and we revolve vainly in a circle which brings us round to our starting-place. If it were possible for us to apprehend the whole series at once, and to take in its detail as one undivided totality, certainly then the timeless would have been experienced as a fact. But in that case ideality on the one side, and events on the other, would have each come to an end in a higher mode of being.
The objections, which we have discussed, have all shown themselves ill-founded. There is certainly nothing experienced which is not an event, though
- ↑ If action is attributed to the Ego things are made even worse, for activity has been shown to imply a sequence in time (Chapter vii.). I may perhaps remind the reader here that to speak of a relation between phenomena and the Reality is quite incorrect. There are no relations, properly, except between things finite. If we speak otherwise, it should be by a licence.
