It should be remembered, however, that the generous present of common discourse is by no means identical with the ideal point between past and future dealt with in the argument under discussion.  We all say:  I now see that the cloud is moving; I now see that the snow is falling.  But there can be no moving, no falling, no change, in the timeless “now” with which we have been concerned.  Is there any evidence whatever that we are shut up, for all our immediate knowledge, to such a “now”?  There is none whatever.

The fact is that this timeless “now” is a product of reflective thought and not a something of which we are directly conscious.  It is an ideal point in the real time of which this chapter has treated, the time that is in a certain sense infinitely divisible.  It is first cousin to the ideal mathematical point, the mere limit between two lines, a something not perceptible to any sense.  We have a tendency to carry over to it what we recognize to be true of the very different present of common discourse, a present which we distinguish from past and future in a somewhat loose way, but a present in which there certainly is the consciousness of change, of duration.  And when we do this, we dig for ourselves a pit into which we proceed to fall.

We may, then, conclude that we are directly conscious of more than the present, in the sense in which Augustine used the word.  We are conscious of time, of “crude” time, and from this we can pass to a knowledge of real time, and can determine its parts with precision.

[1] Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15.

III.  PROBLEMS TOUCHING THE MIND

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT IS THE MIND?

30.  PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.—­The soul or mind, that something to which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to call it in question.  That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind is, he may be quite unable to say.

We have seen (section 7) that children, when quite young, can hardly be said to recognize that they have minds at all.  This does not mean that what is mental is not given in their experience.  They know that they must open their eyes to see things, and must lay their hands upon them to feel them; they have had pains and pleasures, memories and fancies.  In short, they have within their reach all the materials needed in framing a conception of the mind, and in drawing clearly the distinction between their minds and external things.  Nevertheless, they are incapable of using these materials; their attention is engrossed with what is physical,—­with their own bodies and the bodies of others, with the things that they can eat, with the toys with which they can play, and the like.  It is only later that there emerges even a tolerably clear conception of a self or mind different from the physical and contrasted with it.