Duration

“ Time is duration set out by measures. Having thus got the idea of duration, the next thing natural for the mind to do, is to get some measure of this common duration, whereby it might judge of its different lengths, and consider the distinct order wherein several things exist ; without which a great part of our knowledge would be confused, and a great part of history be rendered very useless. ”

“ Celerity of motion and brevity of duration are discovered to be its chief characteristics. Time is therefore depicted as flying,—fast, noiselessly, and uninterruptedly. It is a river, speeding on with imperceptible but resistless pace to the ocean of eternity. ”

“ For, if I can but consider duration equal to one minute, before either the being or motion of any body, I can add one minute more till I come to sixty ; and by the same way of adding minutes, hours, or years (i.e. such or such parts of the sun’s revolutions, or any other period whereof I have the idea) proceed in infinitum, and suppose a duration exceeding as many such periods as I can reckon, let me add whilst I will, which I think is the notion we have of eternity ; of whose infinity we have no other notion than we have of the infinity of number, to which we can add for ever without end. ”

“ Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time has played in the earth's history,—just time, duration,—so slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great changes been brought about! The turning of mud and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems to have been merely a question of time. ”

“ The revolutions of the sun and moon, the properest measures of time for mankind. The diurnal and annual revolutions of the sun, as having been, from the beginning of nature, constant, regular, and universally observable by all mankind, and supposed equal to one another, have been with reason made use of for the measure of duration. ”

“ Eternity.—We have seen that duration is the perseverance or continuance of a being in its existence. The duration of the Absolutely Immutable Being is a positive perfection identical with the essence itself of this Being. It is a duration without beginning, without end, without change or succession, a permanent as distinct from a successive duration, for it is the duration of the Necessary Being, whose essence is Pure Actuality. ”

“ And nothing being a measure of duration but duration, as nothing is of extension but extension, we cannot keep by us any standing, unvarying measure of duration, which consists in a constant fleeting succession, as we can of certain lengths of extension, as inches, feet, yards, &c., marked out in permanent parcels of matter. ”

“ The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. ”

“ As the notion of time is essentially relative, and there is nothing real or absolute in the measure of duration, having once left the Earth, I had lost all standard of measure, and I said to myself that years, centuries indeed, might have passed over my head without my perceiving it, and that the time had seemed short to me because of the great interest I had taken in my aerial voyage—a commonplace idea which shows how merely relative is our notion of time. ”

“ As a matter of fact, this word 'duration' possessed a divine significance for the ancients, for the fulfilment which includes the period of life of any creature, outside of which no natural development can fall, has been called its duration. ”

“ This suffices to show that, although the duration of the movement fills up the whole interval, yet, owing to its very successivity, it cannot be assumed as the ground of the relation intervening between its successive terms.
Third question.—“Is absolute and standing duration a created or an uncreated reality?” This question is easily answered; for, in the first place, standing duration is the duration of a being altogether unchangeable; and nothing unchangeable is created. ”

“ These preliminary considerations enabled us to approach the principal object of this work, the analysis of the ideas of duration and voluntary determination.
Inner duration is a qualitative multiplicity.
What is duration within us? A qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another. ”

“ For without some regular periodical returns, we could not measure ourselves, or signify to others, the length of any duration ; though at the same time the world were as full of motion as it is now, but no part of it disposed into regular and apparently equidistant revolutions. But the different measures that may be made use of for the account of time, do not at all alter the notion of duration, which is the thing to be measured ; no more than the different standards of a foot and a cubit alter the notion of extension to those who make use of those different measures. ”

“ We may measure duration by the succession of thoughts in the mind, as we measure length by inches or feet, but the notion or idea of duration must be antecedent to the mensuration of it, as the notion of length is antecedent to its being measured....Reason, from the contemplation of finite extended things, leads us necessarily to the belief of an immensity that contains them. In like manner, memory gives us the conception and belief of finite intervals of duration. ”

“ It is, moreover, implied in this view that duration is not any really distinct perfection or mode superadded to the actuality of the being that endures.
Other philosophers hold that all duration of creatures is successive; that [pg 331] no individual creature has a mixture of permanent and successive duration; that this successive duration is really distinct from that which endures by means of it; that it is really distinct even from the reality of change or motion itself ”

“ What is directly yielded to our knowledge by sense-awareness is a duration. Accordingly we have now to explain how moments are derived from durations, and also to explain the purpose served by their introduction.
A moment is a limit to which we approach as we confine attention to durations of minimum extension. Natural relations among the ingredients of a duration gain in complexity as we consider durations of increasing temporal extension. Accordingly there is an approach to ideal simplicity as we approach an ideal diminution of extension. ”

“ The duration of anything need not be co-existent with the motion we measure it by. Hence we see that some men imagine the duration of the world, from its first existence to this present year 1689, to have been 5639 years, or equal to 5639 annual revolutions of the sun, and others a great deal more ”

“ The longer periods of time are usually reckoned not by days, but by weeks, months, or years; if, therefore, as to the question of the duration of the 2300 days, we reduce the days to weeks, months, and years, we shall find six years, three or four months, and some days, and discover that the oppression of the people by the little horn was to continue not fully a period of seven years. ”

“ The duration which is the immediate disclosure of our sense-awareness is discriminated into parts. There is the part which is the life of all nature within a room, and there is the part which is the life of all nature within a table in the room. These parts are limited events. They have the endurance of the present duration, and they are parts of it. But whereas a duration is an unlimited whole and in a certain limited sense is all that there is, a limited event possesses a completely defined limitation of extent which is expressed for us in spatio-temporal terms. ”

“ For, since we measure all duration by time or by successive intervals, we can scarcely conceive that there may be duration without succession. Even the word “permanence” which we employ in the definition of duration, and which seems to exclude all notion of change, is always associated in our thought with succession and time. The difficulty we experience in forming a concept of standing duration is as great at least as that which we find in conceiving absolute space without formal extension and parts. ”

“ The mind having got the idea of any length of duration, CAN double, multiply, and enlarge it, not only beyond its own, but beyond the existence of all corporeal beings, and all the measures of time, taken from the great bodies of all the world and their motions. But yet every one easily admits, that, though we make duration boundless, as certainly it is, we cannot yet extend it beyond all being. ”

“ If any man will contend, that the period of duration which we call time is nothing, no farther dispute can be held with him; and he may be left to deny also the existence of matter, and to enjoy his philosophic revel in an ideal world. We apply the same argument to duration generally, whether finite or infinite. Minutes and moments, or smaller portions, for which we have no name, may be artificial things, adopted to aid our conceptions ”

“ As duration is nothing distinct from things, the two terms of the series, B, A, of which one precedes the other, cannot be placed in an absolute duration distinct from the things themselves, as in two distinct instants, independently of the things. ”

“ A duration is discriminated as a complex of partial events, and the natural entities which are components of this complex are thereby said to be ‘simultaneous with this duration.’ Also in a derivative sense they are simultaneous with each other in respect to this duration. Thus simultaneity is a definite natural relation. The word ‘duration’ is perhaps unfortunate in so far as it suggests a mere abstract stretch of time. This is not what I mean. A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness.
Nature is a process. ”

“ Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. ”

“ Duration and succession are more general words than time; we can speak of infinite or eternal duration or succession, but time is commonly contrasted with eternity. Time is measured or measurable duration. ”

“ And in our own anomalous repetition of twice twelve, we may still trace the remains of the twelve-hour day; we have changed the initial point, but we have retained the measure of duration.
It is, however, certain that the two methods of reckoning time continued for a long time to exist contemporaneously. ”

“ Time and place are taken for so much of either as are set out by the existence and motion of bodies. Time and place, taken thus for determinate distinguishable portions of those infinite abysses of space and duration, set out or supposed to be distinguished from the rest, by marks and known boundaries, have each of them a twofold acceptation. ”

“ Duration, time, and eternity, are, not without reason, thought to have something very abstruse in their nature. But however remote these may seem from our comprehension, yet if we trace them right to their originals, I doubt not but one of those sources of all our knowledge, viz. sensation and reflection, will be able to furnish us with these ideas, as clear and distinct as many others which are thought much less obscure ; and we shall find that the idea of eternity itself is derived from the same common original with the rest of our ideas. ”

“ For while a determined portion of this absolute or conscious duration elapses, the same moving body will traverse, as it passes the two bodies, two spaces of which the one is the double of the other, without our being able to conclude from this that a duration is double itself, since duration remains independent of both spaces. ”

“ As we are not accustomed to observe ourselves directly, but perceive ourselves through forms borrowed from the external world, we are led to believe that real duration, the duration lived by consciousness, is the same as the duration which glides over the inert atoms without penetrating and altering them. ”

“ Moreover, from what we have seen about the distinct lines of time described by distinct subjects of flowing duration, it is plain that even the durations of simultaneous movements are always distinct from one another, as belonging to distinct subjects; and accordingly, [260] when one of the said movements ceases, the continuation of the others cannot be looked upon as its continuation. ”

“ Here an inch and a mile are chosen as our standards. In like manner, we speak of so many seconds, or minutes, or hours, or days, or years, choosing that standard of time or duration which is most convenient for our purpose. ”

“ I shall thus get the image of pure duration; but I shall have entirely got rid of the idea of a homogeneous medium or a measurable quantity. By carefully examining our consciousness we shall recognize that it proceeds in this way whenever it refrains from representing duration symbolically. When the regular oscillations of the pendulum make us sleepy, is it the last sound heard, the last movement perceived, which produces this effect? ”

“ The early centuries, like the cycles of the astronomer, pass through our mind rather as one continuous period; the later centuries, like the cycles of the geologist, arrest our thoughts by a succession of minor periods, and hence the idea of duration is more vividly suggested by the diversified events of the one series, than by the comparatively unbroken continuity of the other. ”