Unity of time

“ Thus, if in the time, which we call presented, there exists any lapse, that time is torn by a dilemma, and is condemned to be appearance. But, if the presented is timeless, another destruction awaits us. Time will be the relation of the present to a future and past; and the relation, as we have seen, is not compatible with diversity or unity. Further, the existence, not presented, of future and of past seems ambiguous. But, apart from that, time perishes in the endless process beyond itself. The unit will be for ever its own relation to something beyond, something in the end not discoverable. ”

“ It is not uncommon to meet the view that the unity is timeless, or that it has at any rate no duration. On the other hand, presumably, it has a date, if not a place, in the general series of phenomena, and is, in this sense, an event. The succession I understand to be apprehended somehow in an indivisible moment,—that is, without any lapse of time,—and to be so far literally simultaneous. ”

“ The first thing to be considered here consists in this, that, as stated, distinct divisions of time are united in a unity, in which the Ego independently creates its identity with itself. Inasmuch as the Ego in the first instance only supplies the foundation as abstract self this equability, in respect to the advance of time and its tones, can only assert itself as operative under the mode of a uniformity that is itself abstract, that is to say as the uniform repetition of the same unity of time. ”

“ It evolves in a direction which may be fortuitous, but which, once taken, cannot be changed. It simultaneously embraces the past, the present, and the future. It is a unity in time, a vast synthesis of which we are but fragments. ”

“ It is obvious that no historical play can strictly preserve the true unity of time; cause and effect move slower in the actual machinery of life, than the space of some three hours can allow for: we must unavoidably clump them closer ”

“ 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. ”

“ An eternal consciousness is definable as one for which all the facts of the whole time-stream, just so far as time is a final form of consciousness, have the same type of unity that your present momentary consciousness, even now within its little span, surveys. But if for the divine mind, some still more inclusive form takes up our time-stream into a yet larger unity of experience, all the more is what we mean by temporal succession present together for the Absolute Experience. ”

“ Thus we say, that time has one dimension, and imagine it to ourselves as a line. But the line we have already proved to be the productive synthesis of time, with space under the predominance of time. If we exclude space by an abstract assumption, the time remains as a spaceless point, and represents the concentered power of unity and active negation, i.e. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. ”

“ Trotty was about to answer, ‘Never!’ But he stopped, and was confused.
‘The voice of Time,’ said the Phantom, ‘cries to man, Advance! Time is for his advancement and improvement; for his greater worth, his greater happiness, his better life; his progress onward to that goal within its knowledge and its view, and set there, in the period when Time and He began. Ages of darkness, wickedness, and violence, have come and gone—millions uncountable, have suffered, lived, and died—to point the way before him. ”

“ I cried, “oh radiant Time! thy power
Has nothing more to give; life is complete:
Let but the perfect Present, hour by hour,
Itself remember and itself repeat.
“And Love,—the future can but mar its splendour,
Change can but dim the glory of its youth;
Time has no star more faithful or more tender,
To crown its constancy or light its truth.”
But Time passed on in spite of prayer or pleading,
Through storm and peril; but that life might gain
A Peace through strife all other peace exceeding,
Fresh joy from sorrow, and new hope from pain. ”

“ We have seen that to the thought of the day, heaven and earth, the natural and the miraculous, were all blended into one, and in the people's idea of time there was the same lack of discrimination. They knew of no difference between the people of one period and those of another. ”

“ Hailing the morn on heights of holiness,
Proclaiming peace and freedom to the world. 2620
'Twas time disorder fled, time justice reigned,
And rightfully were held dominion's keys;
Time pure religion's sceptre should return,
By poesy extolled, by art adorned,
With science and with reason reconciled;
Time feeble earth her panacea found,
Time health gave life its old longevity,
Time pride should bend, time lust to love should yield,
And self confess the joy of sacrifice.
'Twas time an Enoch came [17] , a Zion rose. 2630
Sound, trump of God! ”

“ History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true within historical consciousness. ”

“ Each is a measure of time,—the Old belonging to the infinite Past, the New to the infinite Future. But each has its own trials and its own triumphs. Be it our aspiration to smooth the trials and assure the triumphs before us! ”

“ The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man — a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes. ”

“ But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
Which come and go whilst nature stands the same,
We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents.
Even time exists not of itself; but sense
Reads out of things what happened long ago,
What presses now, and what shall follow after:
No man, we must admit, feels time itself,
Disjoined from motion and repose of things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! ”

“ But, on the other hand, even to assert this is to assert that the future, and in fact all the future, in all its individual detail, belongs to reality, and forms part of its wholeness. To admit this is to admit that the true insight, and the divine will, require, and get, the endless whole of future time, as well as of past time, before them in one, not timeless, but time-inclusive survey, which embraces the whole of real life. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ The movement of time is thus not a movement from the past to the future, but from the possible to the actual, from what may be to what has been. The present is not the vanishing point between past and future ”

“ Time, in short, is to our conception, a series in constant onward progress, and cannot be conceived by us, but as a progressive series, of which our separate feelings are parts; the remembrance of the events of our life, whenever we take any distant retrospect of them, being like the remembrance of the space, which we have traversed in a journey,—an indistinct continuity of length, as truly divisible, in our conception, into the separate events which we remember, as the space, which we remember to have traversed, into its separate variety of scenes. ”

“ Think of the obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which has so often taken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has been an eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of the clock! ”

“ The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute's 'timeless' character. For pluralists, on the other hand, time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. ”

“ Hence, throughout the whole philosophy of Ideas there is a certain conception of duration, as also of the relation of time to eternity. He who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of things, the fundamental reality. The Forms, which the mind isolates and stores up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing reality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a startling thought, doubtless, that periods of time compared with which the life of a man, the existence of a nation, nay, the duration of the human race itself, sink into insignificance, should themselves in turn be dwarfed into nothingness by comparison with periods of a still higher order. ”

“ But in any case this aspect of the Past as presented by Eucken shows that human life requires a great span of time which has already run in order to create its ideals and to be raised from the triviality of the mere moment. ”

“ And who knows how short our time may be? When the end comes, will it be easy to bear, the thought that we lost one day, one moment of union, out of respect for idle prejudices which vanish as soon as they find themselves ineffectual? ”

“ It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And if time is so fundamental that an understanding of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between determination and free will. ”

“ Accordingly, we see here the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary unite, and not merely the last presuppose the first, but also the converse. What keeps them apart is the limitation of our intellect through the form of time; for time is the mediator between possibility and actuality. The necessity of the particular event may be fully seen from the knowledge of all its causes ”

“ For this treatment of history, involving, as it does, self-determining activity, an elevation above time is essential. Without in some way transcending time we could not survey individual events and unite them in one representation. But we would do far more than that; we would select and take up into our own life that which is valuable in the earlier, in order thereby to enrich and strengthen our life, and to lead it as far as possible from the present of the mere moment to a present encompassing the ages. ”

“ 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. ”