duration."
Every point along the line of memory, of conscious experience, has been traced out by that unresting stylus we call "the present moment." The question of its rate of motion we will not raise, as it is one with which we have found ourselves impotent to deal. We believe on the best of evidence that the conscious experience of others is conditioned like our own. For better understanding let us have recourse to a homely analogy: let us think of these more or less parallel lines of individual experience in the semblance of the strands of a skein of flax. Now if, at the present moment, this skein were cut with a straight knife at right angles to its length, the cut end would represent the time plane—that is, the present moment of all—and it would be the same for all providing that the time plane were flat But is it really flat? Isn't the straightness of the knife a mere poverty of human imagination? Existence is always richer and more dramatic than any diagram.
"Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round.
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless and ice will burn."
Undoubtedly the flat time-plane represents with fair accuracy the temporal conditions that obtain in the human aggregate in this world under normal conditions of consciousness, but if we consider our relation to intelligent beings upon distant worlds of the visible universe the conditions might be widely different The time section corresponding to what our straight knife made flat in the case of the flax may be—nay, probably is—strongly curved.