We discover
with uneasiness that time, on which we based our whole existence,
itself no longer exists. It is no longer the swiftest of our
gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters
its position no more than space, of which it is doubtless but the
incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the centre of every event;
and every event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and
all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without
moving by a hair's breadth around its motionless pivot. It is
entitled to but one of the thousand names which we have been wont
to lavish upon its power, a power that seemed to us manifold and
innumerable: yesterday, recently, formerly, erewhile, after,
before, tomorrow, soon, never, later fall like childish masks,
whereas to-day and always completely cover with their united
shadows the idea which we form in the end of a duration which has
no subdivisions, no breaks and no stages, which is pulseless,
motionless and boundless.
11
Many are the theories which men have imagined in their attempts
to explain the working of the strange phenomenon; and many others
might be imagined.
As we have seen, self-suggestion and telepathy explain certain
cases which concern events already in existence, but still latent
and perceived before the knowledge of them can reach us by the
normal process of the senses or the intelligence.
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