minated region of
pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall.
As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light
available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the
present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and
then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness
by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history
our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that
imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise
historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits
of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant
future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the
subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus
eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not
either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted
upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what
we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real
alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so
that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What
we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and
where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save
as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our
present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or
lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or
others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine
understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is
always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or
the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious
present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn
future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or
already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward
environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our
present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt
to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of
History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are
not _severed