thought as an item in its history. To say, therefore, that if we completely knew the past condition of all things we should then see that the present is its fulfillment, can mean only that we are construing the present historically. It cannot mean that we have discovered a condition of affairs which, irrespective of the present, would, by a kind of unfolding, produce the present, because irrespective of the present that condition is not only not discoverable, but it does not even exist. Antecedents are only antecedents and evolution is history.
But antecedents are antecedents. That means, naturally, that they cannot be isolated or defined out of relation to the historical movement in which they occur. The past is undoubtedly dead. It is unalterable because it is dead and exists no longer. But this does not allow us to construe the past independent of the continuing processes of things. When we say that the past cannot be changed, all we can profitably mean is that prior to a given date the events that have occurred are not altered by the events that occur subsequently. We cannot mean that our appreciation of what the past was is fixed or that the significance and efficacy of the past as an item in the world's history is completed. In other words, it is only what the past was that is unalterable. What it is, undergoes constant change. What it was, is impotent. What it is, has efficacy. Or, to speak epigramatically, there always was a past, but never is one. This means, I take it, that antecedents are definable only in view of the history to which they belong and as items in that history; they are, neither from the point of view of our knowledge of them nor from the point of view of their own efficacy, fixed and finished things. Even the principle of inertia must be expressed in terms of a continuance in a state if it is to be comprehensible and a principle of things. It should, therefore, be apparent that what the antecedents of anything are, not what they were, is never fully ascertainable nor fully existent except as we arbitrarily fix a date and refuse to pass beyond it. A world which has had a past is a world which will have a future. Undoubtedly its past was what it was and its future will be what it will be, but in so far as it is an evolution which has continuously a past and
