The Community of Time

"The rule that time is needed for the formation of a conscious community is a rule which finds its extremely familiar analogy within the life of every individual human self. Each one of us knows that he just now, at this instant, cannot find more than a mere fragment of himself present. The self comes down to us from its own past. It needs and is a history. Each of us can see that his own idea of himself as this person is inseparably bound up with his view of his own former life, of the plans that he formed, of the fortunes that fashioned him, and of the accomplishments which in turn he has fashioned for himself. A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past."

Written by Josiah Royce

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/community-of-time

“Pp. 35-53.” The Problem of Christianity Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford Vol II, by Josiah Royce, Macmillan, 1914.