ile 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 w