Now this distinction between the real past and the historical past may be fruitful. It may also be treacherous, for the terms in which it is expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very easy to claim that the real past is after all only the historical past, because the past itself being dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved in history. Yet properly understood, the distinction is essential to any philosophical comprehension of what history is. It points out that history is not the past, but is its recovery and conservation. Events begin and end; men are born and die; events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. But it is not their disappearance which constitutes their existence in time a history. Their historical existence is a kind of continuing life. It may be that it continues only in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly illustrates the nature of history as a process in time. In other words the life of knowledge, of memory and imagination, is itself a continual recording of what has happened, a continual understanding of it, and a continual putting of it in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, within the narrow limits of man's perceiving and comprehending life to which we have now restricted history, events begin and end, men are born and die, and events and men disappear into the past in a manner and an order which are unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never to return in the precise and identical manner of their first existence, they are conserved, and continue the process of dying as occurrences in order to live as a history. Yesterday as yesterday is gone forever. Its opportunities are over and its incidents dead. As an historical yesterday it lives as material for to-day's employment. It becomes an experience to profit by, a mistake to remedy, or a success to enjoy. History is thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. We must speak of it in apparent paradoxes. The child becomes a man only by ceasing to be a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only by dying; whatever happens is conserved only by being first destroyed.