Instant

“ Most of us have given very little thought to what we mean by the actual moment. What do we mean by 'now?' How much time is it? Behind 'now' stretches the past, ahead is the future, but is it itself an infinitesimal instant? Do we merely exist as a flash, as a series of flashes, so to speak, of no duration at all, between a past gone by and a future still to come, or does 'now' bulge into both past and future? ”

“ That instant, or time-point, is the strict present. What we call, loosely, the present, is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least a minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is the present time-point.... ”

“ Here pause we for the present—as even then That awful pause, dividing life from death, Struck for an instant on the hearts of men, Thousands of whom were drawing their last breath! A moment—and all will be life again! ”

“ We cannot be actually conscious of more than a single instant of time. The momentary flash which we call the present, the visual image of which can be made permanent by the snap of a camera, is all of the external world that we directly apprehended. ”

“ Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. ”

“ Our human time-consciousness is essentially ill adapted for observing the whole of any one of even our most familiar meanings. In other words, for us men, “the present instant,” so-called, has at once temporal succession, the earlier and the later, included within it, and it has a decidedly, and, in fact, a very inconveniently and arbitrarily, limited length. ”

“ In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time; and what is present to the mind at any ordinary instant, is what is present during a moment in which that instant occurs. ”

“ The punctuating of time at that early period—every thing that gives it an articulate voice—seems of the utmost consequence; for we do not know what scenes in the ideal world may run out of them: a world of interest may hang upon every instant, and we can hardly sustain the weight of future years which are contained in embryo in the most minute and inconsiderable passing events. ”

“ In another way, while time as the form of ethically significant process has doubtless a far deeper truth, temporal succession is subject to a perfectly arbitrary limitation of what one may call the time-span of our human consciousness. What we regard as a present instant is neither a truly instantaneous mere Now, having no finite length, nor a duration long enough to enable us to survey at a glance anywhere nearly as considerable a whole of successively realized meaning as we desire for any one of our more rational human purposes, whether thoughtful, or artistic, or practical. ”

“ Exactly so; but this gives away the whole traditional concept. For a ‘continuity of existence’ must mean an unbroken duration of existence. Accordingly it is admitted that the ultimate fact for observational knowledge is perception through a duration; namely, that the content of a specious present, and not that of a durationless instant, is an ultimate datum for science.
2.5 It is evident that the conception of the instant of time as an ultimate entity is the source of all our difficulties of explanation. If there are such ultimate entities, instantaneous nature is an ultimate fact. ”

“ Why, I’ve just this instant found out—”
“What?”
“That we might have made the tour of the world in only seventy-eight days.” ”

“ If we suppose that time consists of a series of consecutive instants, and that motion consists in passing through a series of consecutive points, then the fastest possible motion is one which, at each instant, is at a point consecutive to that at which it was at the previous instant. Any slower motion must be one which has intervals of rest interspersed, and any faster motion must wholly omit some points. All this is evident from the fact that we cannot have more than one event for each instant. ”

“ The notion of one objective and 'evenly flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we cut the processes of nature. ”

“ Of becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants, and even when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that we are thinking. Such is the most striking of the two illusions we wish to examine. ”

“ When physicists speak of “instantaneous” actions, they mean actions having a finite duration, which, however, is so short that it cannot be appreciated or measured by our means of observation. And therefore what is called an “instantaneous” action is nothing but a continuous action of a short duration. ”

“ If then time be a non-instantaneous movement, just as we often say that some particular instantaneous fact occurs within time, we shall be forced to ask the difference between what is and what is not instantaneous. ”

“ What are the properties we expect of instants? First, they must form a series: of any two, one must be before the other, and the other must be not before the one; if one is before another, and the other before a third, the first must be before the third. Secondly, every event must be at a certain number of instants ”

“ Time is often figuratively represented as a line, and we may perhaps utilize this figure to make clear the relation of our Succession. perception of time to what we call time itself. The present, though conceived as a point or instant of time, is still such that we actually can and do in that moment attend to a plurality of presentations to which we might otherwise have attended to severally in successive moments. Granting this implication of simultaneity and succession, we may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simultaneity as a second line at right angles to the first ”

“ For how could 'time' be measured in minutes or hours by a woman wearing a blindfold, shut away in the dark, and waiting a verdict that could cause the future to slough away into chill gulfs? And how could 'time' have any meaning when the stars faded out of the sky and a sunset gun boomed farewell to the joys of the physical world? ”

“ Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons ”

“ In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment ”

“ George—That which never had a beginning, and can never have an ending, may be denominated Eternity or infinite duration of time, and what is termed time as a separation of periods for the purpose of making definite statements, or for marking definite occurrences. Understand, I now am considering your question from a mortal, not a spirit standpoint, for, on the spirit side, we are not conscious, in the sense that mortals are conscious, of the divisions of time. ”

“ What are the moments loaded with passion, intense, and never-dying—years, ages upon earth! Away with the divisions of time, whilst one short breath—the smallest particle or measure of duration, shall outweigh ages. ”

“ Do we observe how quickly we shoot by it? Do we mark with what increasing swiftness the line of our life seems reeling off, and how close we are coming to the end? Time never stops! Each tick of the clock echoes our advancing footsteps. ”

“ But now, if eternity is nothing else but time, vitally full, illimitably perfect, and blissfully complete, who, we may ask, first of all caused or produced this earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time, which seems but the great bond-chain of the whole world of sense—and what, then, is this time itself? ”

“ Another point worthy of our consideration is, that time is as uncertain as it is short. The present moment is all that we can safely calculate upon. The future is veiled in the bosom of the great Eternal. ”

“ Perhaps it was even less time than that, but it seemed a long while, for under great excitement one lives fast, and in a few seconds one may think a great deal of one's past life. Not only did the past, with electric speed, flash before me, but I had time while in my hazardous position for resolutions for the future that would take a long time to fulfil. ”

“ The moment of His appearance, the moment of His death, the moment of His return, the moment of His perfect triumph, has not yet arrived, not even yet! And yet, at every moment the time is accomplished, every hour is the fullness of time, on condition that the workers are ready. ”

“ O beatitude! the thing we name life, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has nothing in common with this supreme life with which I am now acquainted, which I taste minute by minute, second by second.
Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no more. Time has vanished, and Eternity reigns—an Eternity of delight. ”

“ In our consciousness, however, the now of experience does mean just such an actual, brief, but still finite, interval or period of time, within which and during which events succeed one after another. ”

“ How lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it in our memory! but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it moment by moment, leaning out of each second to encounter the next! ”

“ Dipping its tiny bosom in the deep,
Then instantly uprises blithe and high,
Even as the heart unthralled by earthly things
Will walk this troubled earth, yet ever keep
Its dearest home up in the azure sky. ”

“ Hide thyself for a moment, the smallest part of time we can conceive, like an atom of matter; may, if you can imagine one moment shorter than another, it is but for a little moment, and that with a quasi too, as it were for a little moment, less than you think of. When it is over it will seem as nothing to you ”

“ But naturally we consider that normal which happens to be our standpoint for the moment.
Already to me the earth limitations appear abnormal, and my more extended capacities mark the norm of existence for me. This must be the case naturally.
Prevision would be more accurately termed Whole vision—seeing the whole and not the tiny section.
In moments of intense joy or realisation of any kind, Time seems to cease, and a moment may hold an Eternity. Any absorbing emotion, joyful or sorrowful, may bring this experience. For the moment you are out of yourselves. This is literally true. ”

“ It should convince, too, the most common-sense of philosophers of the distinction between real time, the true stream of duration which is life, and the sequence of seconds so carefully measured by the clock. ”

“ With self-enshrined eternity, &c.
Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid sensation, of either pain or pleasure, makes the time seem long, as the common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our ideas. If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during one minute, by the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed one in quantity. ”

“ And this process is forced on it, both by its temporal form, and again by the continuity of its content, which transcends what is given. Time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but to be a contradictory appearance. ”

“ The finer intelligence, convinced of the correlation between these apparently antagonistic moments, must pause to contemplate the everlasting sequences of time past extended into time to come, and in the end must feel persuaded of its own indissoluble connection with that, whatever it may be, which is permanent in the universe. The moment Now is a potential eternity. That we are is a sufficient proof that we have been and that we shall be. ”

“ For the second that they waited the earth, too, seemed to wait, a solemn, awe-filled moment of incalculable change, a tense moment, as if the unknown, mysterious forces of nature were gathering themselves together for some mighty, unprecedented effort. ”

“ To say, Because a thing is now at one time it therefore must be at another time, or Because it has been through one duration it therefore must be through another duration, and to offer this argument, not as merely for some other reason admissible, but as expressing a principle—strikes my mind as surprising. ”

“ Let us therefore see, O human soul, whether present time can be long; for to thee is it given to perceive and to measure periods of time. What wilt thou reply to me? Is a hundred years when present a long time? ”

“ Spalding, that I was gratified when I first came here to find everybody talking and thinking correctly about time and space. You will have noticed that here we say state, meaning state of consciousness, where we used to say place. In the same way we talk about states of time, meaning time as a state of consciousness. My present state, you will observe, is exactly ten minutes past ten by my clock, which is my consciousness. My consciousness registers time automatically. ”

“ The world’s time is thus in all respects a generalized and extended image and correspondent of the observed time of our inner experience. In the time of our more direct experience, we find a twofold way in which we can significantly call a portion of time a present moment. The present, in our inner experience, means a whole series of events grasped by somebody as having some unity for his consciousness, and as having its own single internal meaning. ”

“ We wish at present rather to look back into past time and see what consequences we may legitimately infer. Such intervals of time as we are familiar with in ordinary life, or even in ordinary history, are for our present purpose quite inappreciable. ”

“ Time, say certain philosophers, is the measure [Pg 295] of a man's ideas marching along in uniform procession. But I hold they are wrong. Time is nothing of the sort; else had time stopped as I hung panting over the pole in the beaver lodge; for one idea and one only, beat and beat and beat to the pulsing of the blood that throbbed through my brain—"I am safe—I am safe—I am safe!" ”