ABSTRACT
the historical conception of reality is profoundly religious and moral, the only one which is adequate to the essence of religion and morality. Determinism and fatalism affect it neither directly nor indirectly, for it reveals necessity as nothing but an aspect of freedom. We can never pass beyond the historical course of events to any reality outside and above ourselves, so that, while history of the past takes on the character of intelligible necessity, history in the making is constantly being created by freedom. Omnipotent time, the master of men and gods, the mathematical time which mechanically divides the continuous course of history, is not, as vulgar thought supposes, the framework within which history moves and which confines and determines it. History is its own frame and contains time, which it uses for its own purposes. The life of reality engages the whole activity of spirit in its complex unity, all thought and action, all truth and goodness; it is a perpetual growth and a gain in perpetuity. It triumphs over death, for nothing that we truly love or desire or value can die; what dies is only our own passing joy or suffering, the tumult which is silenced in the eternal. Knowledge, which is always at bottom historical knowledge, unfolds itself in the service of the moral life; since, in the history constructed by our minds, we step by step become aware only of those series of facts which must be known if we are to fulfil some particular obligation as it arises. Apart from a -moral motive, there is no historical knowledge of reality, no historical consciousness.
