does not yet exist in its relation to
us must necessarily have its being already, and manifest itself
somewhere. If not, it would have to be said that, where Time is
concerned, we form the centre of the world, that we are the only
witnesses for whom events wait so that they may have the right to appear
and to count in the eternal history of causes and effects. It would be
as absurd to assert this for Time as it would be for Space,--that other
not quite so incomprehensible form of the twofold infinite mystery in
which our whole life floats."

The latest progress in this new century is that of overcoming space. It
is being overcome; it is being almost annihilated. When on the Atlantic
Coast we call up a friend in Chicago and speak with him any hour; when
we cable across three thousand miles of water and receive a speedy
reply; when wireless telegraphy wafts its message through the etheric
currents of the air; when the electric motor is about to revolutionize
all our preconceived ideas of distance and journeyings,--we see how
space is being dominated and is no longer to be one of the conditions
that limit man's activities. To a degree, overcoming space is also
overcoming time. In an essay of Emerson's, written somewhere in the
middle of the nineteenth century, he speaks of something as being worth
"going fifty miles to see." Fifty miles, at that time, represented a
greater space than three thousand miles represent at the present.
Regarding the condition of space Maeterlinck further says: "Space is
more familiar to us, because the accidents of our organism place us more
directly in relation with it and make it more concrete. We can move in
it pretty freely, in a certain number of directions, before and behind
us. That is why no traveller would take it into his head to maintain
that the towns which he has not yet visited will become real only at the
moment when he sets his foot within their walls. Yet this is very nearly
what we do when we persuade ourselves that an event which has not yet
happened does not yet exist."

The only explanation of certain phases of the phenomena of life is in
the theory that life is twofold; that what we call life--in the sense of
experiences and events and circumstances--is simply the result, the
precipitation into the physical world, of the events and experiences
that have already occurred to us on the spiritual side of life, and that
they occur here _because_ they have occurred there. Maeter