An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton (bookreader TXT) 📖

"Where, then, is the time that we may call long? Is it future? We do not say of the future: it is long; for as yet there exists nothing to be long. We say: it will be long. But when? If while yet future it will not be long, for nothing will yet exist to be long. And if it will be long, when, from a future as yet nonexistent, it has become a present, and has begun to be, that it may be something that is long, then present time cries out in the words of the preceding paragraph that it cannot be long."

Augustine's way of presenting the difficulty is a quaint one, but the problem is as real at the beginning of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning of the fifth. Past time does not exist now, future time does not exist yet, and present time, it seems, has no duration. Can a man be said to be conscious of time as past, present, and future? Who can be conscious of the nonexistent? And the existent is not time, it has no duration, there is no before and after in a mere limiting point.

Augustine's way out of the difficulty is the suggestion that, although we cannot, strictly speaking, measure time, we can measure memory and expectation. Before he begins to repeat a psalm, his expectation extends over the whole of it. After a little a part of it must be referred to expectation and a part of it to memory. Finally, the whole psalm is "extended along" the memory. We can measure this, at least.

But how is the psalm in question "extended along" the memory or the expectation? Are the parts of it successive, or do they thus exist simultaneously? If everything in the memory image exists at once, if all belongs to the punctual present, to the mere point that divides past from future, how can a man get from it a consciousness of time, of a something whose parts cannot exist together but must follow each other?

Augustine appears to overlook the fact that on his own hypothesis, the present, the only existent, the only thing a man can be conscious of, is an indivisible instant. In such there can be no change; the man who is shut up to such cannot be aware that the past is growing and the future diminishing. Any such change as this implies at least two instants, an earlier and a later. He who has never experienced a change of any sort, who has never been conscious of the relation of earlier and later, of succession, cannot think of the varied content of memory as of that which has been present. It cannot mean to him what memory certainly means to us; he cannot be conscious of a past, a present, and a future. To extract the notion of time, of past, present, and future, from an experience which contains no element of succession, from an indivisible instant, is as hopeless a task as to extract a line from a mathematical point.

It appears, then, that, if we are to be conscious of time at all, if we are to have the least conception of it, we must have some direct experience of change. We cannot really be shut up to that punctual present, that mere point or limit between past and future, that the present has been described as being. But does this not imply that we can be directly conscious of what is not present, that we can now perceive what does not now exist? How is this possible?

It is not easy for one whose reading has been somewhat limited in any given field to see the full significance of the problems which present themselves in that field. Those who read much in the history of modern philosophy will see that this ancient difficulty touching our consciousness of time has given rise to some exceedingly curious speculations, and some strange conclusions touching the nature of the mind.

Thus, it has been argued that, since the experience of each moment is something quite distinct from the experience of the next, a something that passes away to give place to its successor, we cannot explain the consciousness of time, of a whole in which successive moments are recognized as having their appropriate place, unless we assume a something that knows each moment and knits it, so to speak, to its successor. This something is the self or consciousness, which is independent of time, and does not exist in time, as do the various experiences that fill the successive moments. It is assumed to be timelessly present at all times, and thus to connect the nonexistent past with the existent present.

I do not ask the reader to try to make clear to himself how anything can be timelessly present at all times, for I do not believe that the words can be made to represent any clear thought whatever. Nor do I ask him to try to conceive how this timeless something can join past and present. I merely wish to point out that these modern speculations, which still influence the minds of many distinguished men, have their origin in a difficulty which suggested itself early in the history of reflective thought, and are by no means to be regarded as a gratuitous and useless exercise of the ingenuity. They are serious attempts to solve a real problem, though they may be unsuccessful ones, and they are worthy of attention even from those who incline to a different solution.

29. WHAT IS REAL TIME?—From the thin air of such speculations as we have been discussing let us come back to the world of the plain man, the world in which we all habitually live. It is from this that we must start out upon all our journeys, and it is good to come back to it from time to time to make sure of our bearings.

We have seen (Chapter V) that we distinguish between the real and the apparent, and that we recognize as the real world the objects revealed to the sense of touch. These objects stand to each other in certain relations of arrangement; that is to say, they exist in space. And just as we may distinguish between the object as it appears and the object as it is, so we may distinguish between apparent space and real space, i.e. between the relations of arrangement, actual and possible, which obtain among the parts of the object as it appears, and those which obtain among the parts of the object as it really is.

But our experience does not present us only with objects in space relations; it presents us with a succession of changes in those objects. And if we will reason about those changes as we have reasoned about space relations, many of our difficulties regarding the nature of time may, as it seems, be made to disappear.

Thus we may recognize that we are directly conscious of duration, of succession, and may yet hold that this crude and immediate experience of duration is not what we mean by real time. Every one distinguishes between apparent time and real time now and then. We all know that a sermon may _seem _long and not be long; that the ten years that we live over in a dream are not ten real years; that the swallowing of certain drugs may be followed by the illusion of the lapse of vast spaces of time, when really very little time has elapsed. What is this real time?

It is nothing else than the order of the changes which take place or may take place in real things. In the last chapter I spoke of space as the "form" of the real world; it would be better to call it a "form" of the real world, and to give the same name also to time.

It is very clear that, when we inquire concerning the real time of any occurrence, or ask how long a series of such lasted, we always look for our answer to something that has happened in the external world. The passage of a star over the meridian, the position of the sun above the horizon, the arc which the moon has described since our last observation, the movement of the hands of a clock, the amount of sand which has fallen in the hourglass, these things and such as these are the indicators of real time. There may be indicators of a different sort; we may decide that it is noon because we are hungry, or midnight because we are tired; we may argue that the preacher must have spoken more than an hour because he quite wore out the patience of the congregation. These are more or less uncertain signs of the lapse of time, but they cannot be regarded as experiences of the passing of time either apparent or real.

Thus, we see that real space and real time are the plan of the world system. They are not things of any sort, and they should not be mistaken for things. They are not known independently of things, though, when we have once had an experience of things and their changes, we can by abstraction from the things themselves fix our attention upon their arrangement and upon the order of their changes. We can divide and subdivide spaces and times without much reference to the things. But we should never forget that it would never have occurred to us to do this, indeed, that the whole procedure would be absolutely meaningless to us, were not a real world revealed in our experience as it is.

He who has attained to this insight into the nature of time is in a position to offer what seem to be satisfactory solutions to the problems which have been brought forward above.

(1) He can see, thus, why it is absurd to speak of any portion of time as becoming nonexistent. Time is nothing else than an order, a great system of relations. One cannot drop out certain of these and leave the rest unchanged, for the latter imply the former. Day-after-to-morrow would not be day-after-to-morrow, if to-morrow did not lie between it and to-day. To speak of dropping out to-morrow and leaving it the time it was conceived to be is mere nonsense.

(2) He can see why it does not indicate a measureless conceit for a man to be willing to say that time is infinite. One who says this need not be supposed to be acquainted with the whole past and future history of the real world, of which time is an aspect. We constantly abstract from things, and consider only the order of their changes, and in this order itself there is no reason why one should set a limit at some point; indeed, to set such a limit seems a gratuitous absurdity. He who says that time is infinite does not say much; he is not affirming the existence of some sort of a thing; he is merely affirming a theoretical possibility, and is it not a theoretical possibility that there may be an endless succession of real changes in a real world?

(3) It is evident, furthermore, that, when one has grasped firmly the significance of the distinction between apparent time and real time, one may with a clear conscience speak of time as infinitely divisible. Of course, the time directly given in any single experience, the minute or the second of which we are conscious as it passes, cannot be regarded as composed of an infinite number of parts. We are not directly conscious of these subdivisions, and it is a monstrous assumption to maintain that they must be present in the minute or second as perceived.

But no such single experience of duration constitutes what we mean by real time. We have seen that real time is the time occupied by the changes in real things, and the question is, How far can one go in the subdivision of this time?

Now, the touch thing which usually is for us in common life the real thing is not the real thing for science; it is the appearance under which the real world of atoms and molecules reveals itself. The