they possess.

That which _has been_ exists no more; it exists as little as that
which has _never_ been. But of everything that exists you must say, in
the next moment, that it has been. Hence something of great importance
now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in
that the latter is a _reality_, and related to the former as something
to nothing.

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing,
after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for
a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he
must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that
it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a
subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in
its nature. This ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true
system of metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of
things than is to be met with in the domain of nature. This is why
Kant is so great.

Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it
_is_; for ever after, that it _was_. Every evening we are poorer by a
day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span
of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our
being we are secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring
of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.

Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to
embrace the belief that the greatest _wisdom_ is to make the enjoyment
of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only
reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand,
such a course might just as well be called the greatest _folly_: for
that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly,
like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present--the
ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our
existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no
possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always
striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his
legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or,
again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a
planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry
forward on its way. Unrest