Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of man’s happiest ultimate consciousness,--whether it is one of succession or of simultaneity: in other words, whether, besides the disappearance of the category of space (a point already discussed), there is likely to be the lapse of the category of time also.--And let it be noted that the retention of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory, does not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in Heaven, since those two states are admittedly non-normative, whereas the latter represents the very ideal and measure of man’s full destination and perfection. (1) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the ultimacy of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as necessarily concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson, among the poets, does so, in his beautiful “Crossing the Bar”: “From out our bourne of Time and Place, the flood may bear me far”; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, among speculative theologians, in criticising Rothe’s conception of man as a quite ultimately spacial-temporal being, treats these two questions as standing and falling together.[283]--Yet a careful study of Kant’s critique of the two categories of Space and Time suffices to convince us of the indefinitely richer content, and more ultimate reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall attempt to show more fully in the next Chapter, with the aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical, uniform clock-time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up of our profound experience of a duration in which the constituents (sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings) of the succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, interpenetrate, and modify each other, and the quite automatic and necessary simplification and misrepresentation of this experience by its imaginary projection on to space,--its restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly equable succession of mutually exclusive moments. It is in that interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time, that our deeper human experiences take place. (2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest apprehension? Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that we are well aware, in our profoundest experiences, of “that permanently incomprehensible fact,--the existence of, as it were, a prism, through which the unitary ray of light, which fills our consciousness with a real content, is spread out into a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself, exists in pure unitedness” and simultaneity, “becomes intelligible to us only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. Beyond the prism, there are no such two things.” And he shows how keenly conscious we are, at times, of that deepest mode of apprehension and of being which is a Simultaneity, an eternal Here and Now; and how ruinous to our spiritual life would be a full triumph of the category of time.[284]