Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive essence of the Authentic Existent does not consist merely in the completeness inherent in its members ; its essence includes, further, its established immunity from aU lack with the exclusion, also, of all that is without Being — for not only must all things be contained in the All and Whole, but it can contain nothing that is, or was ever non-existent — and this State and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity : in our very word, Eternity means Ever-Being (aion=aei on).
This Ever-Being is realised when upon examination of an object I am able to say — or rather, to know — that in its very Nature it is incapable of increment or change ; anything that fails by that test is no Ever- Existent or, at least, no Ever- All-Existent.
But is perpetuity enough in itself to constitute an Eternal ?
No : the object must, farther, include such a Nature-Principle as to give the assurance that the actual state excludes all future change, so that it is found at every observation as it always was.
Imagine, then, the state of a being which cannot faU away from the vision of this but is for ever caught to it, held by the spell of its grandeur, kept to it by virtue of a nature itself unfailing — or even the state of one that must labour towards Eternity by directed effort, but then to rest in it, immoveable at any point, assimilated to it, co-etemal with it, con- templating Eternity and the Eternal by what is Eternal within the self.
Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent — one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that is now receiving none and will never receive any — we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement also of perdurance and of Eternity : per- durance is the corresponding state arising from the (divine) substratum and inherent in it ; Eternity (the Principle as distinguished from the property of everlastingness) is that substratum carrying that state in manifestation.
Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great ; it proves on investigation to be identical with God ; it may fitly be described as God made manifest, as God declaring what He is, as existence without jolt or change, and therefore as also the firmly living.
And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it ; each of the Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue of unlimited force ; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is pre-eminently the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its own substance .
Iii. 7. 6]
Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a life limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possesses itself intact for ever. To the notion of a Life (a Living-Principle) all- comprehensive add that it never spends itself, and we have the statement of a Life instantaneously infinite.
Now the Principle this stated, aU good and beauty, and everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its law ; and it is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato — finely, and by no means inadvertently but with profound intention — wrote those words of his “Eternity stable in Unity”; he wishes to convey that Eternity is not merely something circling on its traces into a final unity but has (instantaneous) Being about The One as the imchanging Life of the Authentic Existent. This is certainly what we have been seeking : this Principle, at rest within the One, is Eternity ; possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute self-identical and none the less the active manifestation of an unchanging Life set towards the Divine and dwelling within It, imtrue, therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side of Life — this will be Eternity (the Real-Being we have sought) .
Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing variet37^ in the mode of existence : Being is, therefore, self-identical throughout, and, therefore, again is one undistinguishable thing. Being can have no this and that ; it cannot be treated in terms of intervals, unfoldings, progression, extension ; there is no grasping any first or last in it.
If, then, there is no first or last in this Principle, if existence is its most authentic possession and its very self, and this in the sense that its existence is Essence or Life — then, once again, we meet here what we have been discussing. Eternity.
Observe that such words as “ always, never, sometimes ” must be
taken as mere conveniences of exposition : thus “ always ” — used in the sense not of time but of incorruptibility and endlessly complete scope — might set up the false notion of stage and interval. We might perhaps prefer to speak of “ Being,” without any attribute ; but since this term is applicable to Essence and some writers have used the word Essence for things of process, we cannot convey our meaning to them without introducing some word carrying the notion of perdurance.
There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being ; just as there is none between a philosopher and a true philosopher : the attribute “ true ” came into use because there arose what masqueraded as philosophy ; and for similar reasons “ everlasting ” was adjoined to “ Being,” and ” Being ” to " everlasting,” and we have (the tautology of) ” Everlasting Being.” We must take this “ Everlasting ” as express- ing no more than Authentic Being : it is merely a partial expression of a potency which ignores all interval or term and can look forward to nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The Principle of which this is the statement will be the AU-Existent, and, as being aU, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one point complete and at some other lacking.
Things and Beings in the Time order — even when to all appearance complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a soul — are still bound to sequence ; they are deficient to the extent of that thing. Time, which they need : let them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete ; completeness is attributed to them only by an accident of language.
But the conception of Eternity demands something which is in its nature complete without sequence ; it is not satisfied by something measured out to any remoter time or even by something limitless, but, in its limitless reach, still having the progression of futurity : it requires something immediately possessed of the due fullness of Being, something whose Being does not depend upon any quantity (such as instalments of time) but subsists before aU quantity.
Itself having no quantity, it can have no contact with anything quantitative since its Life cannot be made a thmg of fragments, in con-
Iii. 7. 7]
tradiction to the partlessness which is its character ; it must be without parts in the Life as in the essence.
The phrase “ He was good ” (used by Plato of the Demiurge) refers to the Idea of the All ; and its very indefiniteness signifies the utter absence of relation to Time : so that even this Universe has had no temporal beginning; and if we speak of something “ before ” it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects it as inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms.
Now comes the question whether, in all this discussion, we are not merely helping to make out a case for some other order of Beings and talking of matters alien to ourselves.
But how could that be ? What understanding can there be failing some point of contact ? And what contact could there be with the utterly alien ?
We must then have, ourselves, some part or share in Eternity.
Still, how is this possible to us who exist in Time ?
The whole question turns on the distinction between being in Time and being in Eternity, and this will be best realised by probing to the Nature of Time. We must, therefore, descend from Eternity to the investigation of Time, to the realm of Time : till now we have been taking the upward way ; we must now take the downward — ^not to the lowest levels but within the degree in which Time itself is a descent from Eternity.
If the venerable sages of former days had not treated of Time, our method would be to begin by linking to (the idea of) Eternity (the idea of) its Next (its inevitable downward or outgoing subsequent in the same order), then setting forth the probable nature of such a Next and proceeding to show how the conception thus formed tallies with our own doctrine.
But, as things are, our best beginning is to range over the most note-
io6
worthy of the ancient opinions and see whether any of them accord with ours.
Existing explanations of Time seem to fall into three classes : —
Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some phenomenon of Movement : obviously it cannot be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since, in its characteristic idea, it is concerned with change.
Of those that explain it as Movement, some identify it with Absolute Movement (or with the total of Movement), others with that of the All. Those that make it a moved object would identify it with the orb of the All. Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of Movement treat it, severally, either as a standard of measure or as something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite.
Movement Time cannot be — whether a definite act of moving is meant or a united total made up of all such acts — since movement, in either sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any move- ment not in Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable.
In a word, Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes place.
And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is decisive : Movement can come to rest, can be intermittent ; Time is continuous.
We will be told that the Movement of the All is continuous (and so may be identical with Time).
But, if the reference is to the Circuit of the heavenly system (it is not strictly continuous, or equable, since) the time taken in the return path is not that of the outgoing movement ; the one is twice as long as the other : this Movement of the All proceeds, therefore, by two different degrees ; the rate of the entire journey is not that of the first half.
Further, the fact that we hear of the Movement of the outermost sphere being the swiftest confirms our theory. Obviously, it is the swiftest
of movements by taking the lesser time to traverse the greater space — the very greatest — all other moving things are slower by taking a longer time to traverse a mere segment of the same extension ; in other words, Time is not this movement.
And, if Time is not even the movement of the Kosmic Sphere much less is it the sphere itself though that has been identified with Time on the ground of its being in motion.
Is it, then, some phenomenon or connection of Movement ?
Let us, tentatively, suppose it to be extent, or duration, of Move- ment.
Now, to begin with. Movement, even continuous, has no unchanging extent (as Time the equable has), since, even in space, it may be faster or slower ; there must, therefore, be some unit of standard outside it, by which these differences are measurable, 8ind this outside standard would more properly be called Time. And failing such a measure, which extent would be Time, that of the fast or of the slow — or rather which of them all, since these speed-differences are limitless ?
Is it the extent of the subordinate Movement ( = movement of things of earth) ?
Again, this gives us no unit since the movement is infinitely variable ; we would have, thus, not Time but Times.