, in the first place, that does not get
over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He
must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks
out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly,
when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present
together--of course it may all be _known_ together as even we know the
past and the future--but when you try to think of God as contemplating
the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a
time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of
series--practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the
knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of
this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking
about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I
can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of
an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I
can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of
any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the
present at least--I strongly suspect for ever--we must acquiesce on this
matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding
time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very
essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as
anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this
objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no
Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems
enough to believe that each member of the time-series--no matter how many
such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or
not--is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally
admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as
that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things
by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation
be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in
that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]

{93}

(3) _The creation of spirits_. It may seem to some of you that I may
have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our
argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world
cannot be explained without the