The Nature Of Time

That eminent scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, offers an ingenious and

interesting, though very technical explanation of this class of

clairvoyant phenomena as follows: "Time is but a relative mode of

regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite

pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner,

as if events moved necessarily in this order and at this precise rate.

But that may b only one mode of regarding them. The events may be in

some sort of existence always, both past and future, and it may be we

who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a

traveler in a railway train is useful; if he could never leave the

train, nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as

necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. We

perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time,

the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present

limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be

actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling

influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the

'higher plane' or totality of things after which, it seems to me, we are

impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or

determinism, and the action of human beings consciously directed to a

definite and preconceived end."