cern. You feel no one of them as
inwardly simple, and no two as wholly without confluence where they
touch. There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, if
mystery it be. The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes
with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous
procession. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there is
literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal
postulate of abstract thought.[6] The 'passing' moment is, as I
already have reminded you, the minimal fact, with the 'apparition of
difference' inside of it as well as outside. If we do not feel both
past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all. We
have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time.
The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting
peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always off
its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a
darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn
fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as
an alteration. 'Yes,' we say at the full brightness, '_this_ is what I
just meant.' 'No,' we feel at the dawning, 'this is not yet the full
meaning, there is more to come.' In every crescendo of sensation, in
every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction
of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fulness that have
reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the
phenomenon. In every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal
presence which is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which the
only function of the present is to _mean_, is even more notoriously
there. And in the movement of pure thought we have the same
phenomenon. When I say _Socrates is mortal_, the moment _Socrates_ is
incomplete; it falls forward through the _is_ which is pure movement,
into the _mortal_ which is indeed bare mortal on the tongue, but
for the mind is _that mortal_, the _mortal Socrates_, at last
satisfactorily disposed of and told off.[7]

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of experience, is realized
that very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the
absolute can genuinely possess. The gist of the matter is always the
same--something ever goes indissolubly with something else. You cannot
separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real
altogether and tak