“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?