Temporal power

“ For your own grasp of the contents of your passing instant of consciousness faces at once a series of successive events, but also does not therefore bring before your insight all the successive contents of any present moment at any one temporal point within that present moment. What your own passing consciousness is to grasp at once, within the range of its own time-span, consists of facts which are successive one to another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As, in this life, consciousness is interrupted by sleep and by accidents, so the temporal processes, in whatever variety they have, which fulfil in their wholeness and in their relations to the eternal order the life of an individual, may be, for all that I can see, in any one of a large number of relations to us and to one another, — contemporaneous, continuously successive, or discontinuously successive, with temporal gaps of any magnitude. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But no series of experiences upon which attention is fixed is wholly indifferent to us; and the temporal aspect of such series always involves some element of expectancy and some sense of something that no longer is; and both these conscious attitudes color our interest in the presented succession, and give the whole the meaning of life. Time is thus indeed the form of practical activity ”

“ Now for our theory, that is precisely the way in which the eternal consciousness views the temporal order, — not ignoring one jot or tittle of its sharp distinctions of past or of future, of succession or of duration, — but still viewing the whole time-process as the expression of a single Internal Meaning. What we now call past and future are not merely the same for God; and, nevertheless, they are viewed at once, precisely as the beginning and the end of the rhythm are not the same for our experience, but are yet at once seen as belonging to one and the same whole succession. ”

“ Our brief, but still by no means indefinitely small time-span of consciousness, determines in this way our whole human form of experience, and of course limits the ethical meaning of our conduct. Yet how long a temporal period, how much duration, shall constitute the finite interval viewed by a given form of consciousness as a now, is a wholly arbitrary matter, so long as now means not the ideal mathematical now, — the negation of all duration, the mere point between present and future, but rather a period, a succession of events, a finite duration. ”

“ What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable absolute? ”

“ It would be our interest therefore to keep far away from such a stream, lest, engaged on temporal things, we should neglect eternity. How can a man keep for ever anything here, be his love for it never so passionate? Which of life’s most cherished objects endures always? What flower of prime? What gift of strength and beauty? What wealth, or fame, or power? They all have their transient bloom, and then melt away into their opposites. Who can continue in life’s prime? Whose strength lasts for ever? Has not Nature made the bloom of beauty even more short-lived than the shows of spring? ”

“ In order to conceive what, in general, such an eternal view of the temporal order involves, or to conceive in what sense the temporal order of the real world is also an eternal order, we have, therefore, but to remember the sense in which the melody, or other sequence, is known at once to our own consciousness, despite the fact that its elements when viewed merely in their temporal succession are, in so far, not at once. ”

“ Can any Sovereign, or Holy Alliance of Sovereigns, bid Time stand still; even in thought, shake themselves free of Time? Our whole terrestrial being is based on Time, and built of Time; it is wholly a Movement, a Time-impulse ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have never seen a use of the term which to my mind retained its sense if time-sequence is removed. We can, of course, talk of a power sustaining or producing effects, which are subordinate and yet not subsequent; but to talk thus is not to think. ”

“ Every change leaves a series of trainées lumineuses in the mind like the passage of shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase, according as its original was more remote. This group of images gives duration, the mere time-form, the 'bed' of time. The distinction of past, present, and future within the bed comes from our active nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She looked on a neat little world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow in search paying.... ”

“ 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? ”

“ As time, it has been said, can only be recognised by change, which involves a succession of events, our idea of time is entirely governed by the unit we adopt. The palæontologists, or students of ancient life, form their notion of the lapse of time, not from the lives of individuals, or the duration of empires ”

“ Thus it is that when we stretch our view through immense vistas of time past, or when we look forward through immeasurable ages of time to come, the alteration in the length of the day will assume the most startling proportions, and involve the most momentous consequences. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence, too, the human, and this also is true of every mundane soul, uses periods and restitutions of its proper life. For, in consequence of being measured by time, it energizes transitively, and possesses a proper motion. But every thing which is moved perpetually and participates of time, revolves periodically and proceeds from the same to the same. ”

“ And this is borne out by individual reflection. When striking and deeply interesting events follow one another very rapidly, as when we are travelling, duration appears to swell out.
It is possible that such a succession of stirring experiences may beget a vague consciousness of time at each successive moment, and apart from retrospection, simply by force of the change. In other words, without our distinctly attending to time, a series of novel impressions might, by giving us the consciousness of change, make us dimly aware of the numerical richness of our experiences. ”

“ Free-Will. "Time is but a relative mode of regarding things." "Events may, in some sense, exist always, both past and future." Time like a moving-picture reel, containing the future scene at the present moment, though out of sight. Analogy of dream-time. An Absolute Consciousness in which past, present and future exist as a single perception. A glimpse of a transcendental truth. How to acquire the faculty of Future-Clairvoyance. ”

“ We are told that this people, in their comparative ignorance of the material universe, sought relief from the oppressive idea of the endless duration of time by breaking it up into distinct cycles, each of several thousand years' duration. ”

“ The lapse of time has enabled the system to be evolved by the gradual but constant accretions of human thought, from generation to generation, until it has grown, from the first vague hope of the human soul for a life beyond the grave, to its present stupendous proportions. ”

“ Hence, time is related to power as space is to matter. Power and matter being the subjective realities, while space and time are their objective results, or the necessary effects of the experience in consciousness of their united result, which is motion. ”

“ Every moment of duration is determined by all past moments, and will determine all future movements, and even the position of a grain of sand cannot be conceived other than it is, without supposing other changes to an indefinite extent. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ Let one sit with closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world, attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one who wakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the middle of the night, and all things moving to a day of doom." ”

“ Therefore, there is another defining time frame in which they are invited to flourish. In all of these times, every change that happens is unique, but the Source of all these changes remains unaltered and unchanging. ”

“ And different presents, unless they are successive, cannot be real. So the different time-series, which are real, must be able to exist independently of the distinction between past, present, and future. ”

“ When the future, thanks to such computations, becomes transparent, the sensation of time is lost, and it seems that you are standing motionless on the deck of the foresight of the future. The sensation of time dissappears and it resembles a field before and a field behind, turning into a kind of space... ”

“ Watching a green land in the dying golden sunlight of an age lost to human memory could restore a man's strength of purpose by its serenity alone. But even an age of war and pestilence could be observed without torment from behind the protective shields of the Time Machine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To my mind, therefore, time, as the form of the will, is (in so far as we can undertake to define at all the detailed structure of finite reality) to be viewed as the most pervasive form of all finite experience, whether human or extra-human. In pursuing its goals, the Self lives in time. ”

“ Through the straggling branches appeared the tottering dial of Time where not a sun-ray could reach it; for Time himself may well go to sleep where progress is but disintegration. Time himself is nothing, does nothing; he is but the medium in which the forces work. ”

“ Then, if it worked, we'd be able to return, but on a different time-line—because, obviously, on our own line nothing like this doubling-back had already happened. Changing the past changes the future; you know the theory. ”

“ There'll never be anything more than periods of twelve hours, until you come back: just from dawn to dark, and then from dark to dawn, over and over again. Each period must be fought through as it comes, with no thought about the others. ”

“ In our perception of change elements go out, and something new comes to us constantly; and we construct the time-series entirely with reference to this experience. Thus, whether we regard events as running forwards from the past, or as emerging from the future, in any case we use one method of taking our bearings. Our fixed direction is given solely by the advent of new arrivals. But, if this is so, then direction is relative to our world. You may object that it is fixed in the very nature of things, and so imparts its own order to our special sphere. ”

“ Now nobody can for an instant defend the rationality of supposing that every possible form of consciousness must have the precise human limitation of time-span. Yet a notable alteration of time-span, quite apart from any alteration of the contents that succeed one after another in the minds in question, would constitute a variation of a given type of consciousness whose vast possible meaning, both psychological and ethical, it is almost impossible to estimate. ”