The present moment is a very transient thing; its roots are in the past, its hopes in the future.

"If all depends on the slender thread of the fleeting moment of the present, which illumines and endures merely for a twinkling of an eye, but to sink into the abyss of nothingness, then all life would mean a mere exit into death....

Without connection there is no content of life." We are apt to look on the past as something dead, but it exists in living evidence in our souls to-day.

It oppresses us or stimulates us to action, it tyrannises over us or inspires us to higher things.

It has been customary to look upon the past as irrevocable.
Recent writers, of whom Maeterlinck and Eucken are striking instances, have endeavoured to show how the past can be remoulded and changed.