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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Two Great Inventions|5-39}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Two Great Inventions|5-39}} | ||
... | For of course, if the retina in question were conceived as travelling from the earth so rapidly that in a minute's time it could overtake the ray which left the earth a thousand years ago, then for that one point of space, such a retina would travel in a minute over the history of a thousand years. Well, that was but an imaginative illustration of the subjective character of the meaning of time. But here is a real illustration of it which we may all witness. It may happen even in the lifetime of living men that real conversations will be carried on between the most distant points when beings with earthly bodies can manage to reach; and it may happen, too, also in the lifetime of living men, that the perfect semblance of the voice of one who died during a man's infancy may vibrate in his ear and repeat his own very words, in his young contemporary's old age. The future, indeed, may bear more wonderful things still. It may hear the voices of every century, from and after the nineteenth, though of none before it, reproduced ages hence. The problems which we discuss so hotly as to the mode in which the Greeks and Romans spoke their language may have no existence in relation to the pronunciation of words in any age later than this, for the actual sound of every existing provincial dialect may be reproduced literally, and this for ears to which not only such dialects, but the most classical forms of the most classical languages of our day, will have become quite obsolete. The thirtieth century may hear the orations of a Welsh Eisteddfod and the broad clamor of a Yorkshire horse-fair in the very accents of our own time. Surely nothing could be more impressive as a lesson on the undue importance which we attach to time. ''We have heard with our ears, and our fathers have told us,'' may in future apply not merely to the fathers we have seen, but to the forefathers we have never seen. The distinction between dead and living languages, indeed, may thus be in great measure obliterated. The ancient world—ancient, that is, to our posterity—may be, to the ear at least, and to the eye also, as far as photography can make it so, present and living still. Men may live, as it were, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-ninth at the same time, belonging, indeed, to the twenty-ninth, but being auricular confessions communicated straight from the nineteenth. Will a man so situated have any notion like that which we attach to the irrecoverable 'past?' Will he not live in a sort of focus of all spaces and all times, hardly distinguishing, as we do, ancient from modern, and hardly even the near from the distant? Whatever he may lose by that bewildering position, he will certainly gain a clearer view of the highly subjective character of time and space, and its almost purely personal significance—a significance, that is, requiring entirely separate interpretation, in reference to the particular conditions of particular organizations.—''London Spectator.'' | ||