Above all things, we must distinctly recognise that the form of the
phenomenon of will, the form of life or reality, is really only the
_present_, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the
conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it
follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the
past, and none will live in the future; the _present_ alone is the form of
all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. The
present always exists, together with its content. Both remain fixed
without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall. For life is firm and
certain in the will, and the present is firm and certain in life.
Certainly, if we reflect on the thousands of years that are past, of the
millions of men who lived in them, we ask, What were they? what has become
of them? But, on the other hand, we need only recall our own past life and
renew its scenes vividly in our imagination, and then ask again, What was
all this? what has become of it? As it is with it, so is it with the life
of those millions. Or should we suppose that the past could receive a new
existence because it has been sealed by death? Our own past, the most
recent part of it, and even yesterday, is now no more than an empty dream
of the fancy, and such is the past of all those millions. What was? What
is? The will, of which life is the mirror, and knowledge free from will,
which beholds it clearly in that mirror. Whoever has not yet recognised
this, or will not recognise it, must add to the question asked above as to
the fate of past generations of men this question also: Why he, the
questioner, is so fortunate as to be conscious of this costly, fleeting,
and only real present, while those hundreds of generations of men, even
the heroes and philosophers of those ages, have sunk into the night of the
past, and have thus become nothing; but he, his insignificant ego,
actually exists? or more shortly, though somewhat strangely: Why this now,
his now, _is_ just now and _was_ not long ago? Since he asks such strange
questions, he regards his existence and his time as independent of each
other, and the former as projected into the latter. He assumes indeed two
nows—one which belongs to the object, the other which belongs to the
subject, and marvels at the happy accident of their coincidence. But in
truth, only the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time,
with the subject, which has no mode of the principle of sufficient reason
as its form, constitutes the present, as is shown in the essay on the
principle of sufficient reason. Now all object is the will so far as it
has become idea, and the subject is the necessary correlative of the
object. But real objects are only in the present; the past and the future
contain only conceptions and fancies, therefore the present is the
essential form of the phenomenon of the will, and inseparable from it. The