Thus we may recognize that we are directly conscious of duration, of succession, and may yet hold that this crude and immediate experience of duration is not what we mean by real time.  Every one distinguishes between apparent time and real time now and then.  We all know that a sermon may seem long and not be long; that the ten years that we live over in a dream are not ten real years; that the swallowing of certain drugs may be followed by the illusion of the lapse of vast spaces of time, when really very little time has elapsed.  What is this real time?

It is nothing else than the order of the changes which take place or may take place in real things.  In the last chapter I spoke of space as the “form” of the real world; it would be better to call it a “form” of the real world, and to give the same name also to time.

It is very clear that, when we inquire concerning the real time of any occurrence, or ask how long a series of such lasted, we always look for our answer to something that has happened in the external world.  The passage of a star over the meridian, the position of the sun above the horizon, the arc which the moon has described since our last observation, the movement of the hands of a clock, the amount of sand which has fallen in the hourglass, these things and such as these are the indicators of real time.  There may be indicators of a different sort; we may decide that it is noon because we are hungry, or midnight because we are tired; we may argue that the preacher must have spoken more than an hour because he quite wore out the patience of the congregation.  These are more or less uncertain signs of the lapse of time, but they cannot be regarded as experiences of the passing of time either apparent or real.

Thus, we see that real space and real time are the plan of the world system.  They are not things of any sort, and they should not be mistaken for things.  They are not known independently of things, though, when we have once had an experience of things and their changes, we can by abstraction from the things themselves fix our attention upon their arrangement and upon the order of their changes.  We can divide and subdivide spaces and times without much reference to the things.  But we should never forget that it would never have occurred to us to do this, indeed, that the whole procedure would be absolutely meaningless to us, were not a real world revealed in our experience as it is.

He who has attained to this insight into the nature of time is in a position to offer what seem to be satisfactory solutions to the problems which have been brought forward above.

(1) He can see, thus, why it is absurd to speak of any portion of time as becoming nonexistent.  Time is nothing else than an order, a great system of relations.  One cannot drop out certain of these and leave the rest unchanged, for the latter imply the former.  Day-after-to-morrow would not be day-after-to-morrow, if to-morrow did not lie between it and to-day.  To speak of dropping out to-morrow and leaving it the time it was conceived to be is mere nonsense.