In the first lecture I pointed out how impossible it appears ever to end any history finally. We now seem to face a corresponding impossibility, namely, the impossibility of ever really beginning it successfully. It would appear that we stop only because we do not care to go farther, or lack the means to do so, and not because we can say that we have found a first beginning with no antecedents before it. We may begin the history of philosophy with the Greeks, with Thales of Miletus, but the question has been repeatedly asked, Was not Thales a Semite? Did he not derive his ideas from Egypt and Babylonia? And whence came philosophy itself? Was it not the offspring of religion which preceded it, so that, before we begin its history, we must pass, as Professor Cornford suggests,[6] from religion to philosophy? Then what of religion itself? What were its antecedents and whence was its descent? So the questions multiply interminably until we must admit that "in the beginning" is a time arbitrarily fixed or only relatively determined. History, being continuous, has neither beginning nor end. This fact, however, ought not to bewilder any one who contemplates it steadily. It is an obvious consequence of the nature of time, for every present has a past and a future, and a first or last present is, consequently, quite unintelligible. The historian, least of all, should be bewildered. If he has recognized that history is pluralistic, he will recognize also that beginnings and ends are, in any intelligible sense, the termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute first or last in history taken as a whole, for, as we have seen, the attempt to take history as a whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the attempt to define history. It gives us the metaphysics of time, but not an absolute, complete, and finished whole, whose boundaries, although never empirically reached, are ideally conceivable. Our thinking moves in a direction quite different. It leads us to observe that distinctions begin and end, and begin and end as absolutely as one chooses, but do not, thereby, cut themselves off from all connections. These lectures began to be delivered last Friday, but not the day before; the first word of them was written at a perfectly definite time and place which can never be changed; they will end with a definiteness equally precise; but these beginnings and endings destroy no continuity. Every history is equally continuous, undisturbed by its beginnings and endings. Each action of time is preceded and followed by everything which precedes and follows it, and yet each action of time begins and ends with its own peculiar and individual precision. In affirming this we are affirming, by means of a particular instance, the metaphysical nature of continuity itself. For by continuity we mean the possibility of precise and definite distinctions. The continuity of a line may be divided at its middle point. It is then precisely divided, but is not, thereby, broken