nse-awareness. For mind there is the immediate
sense-awareness and there is memory. The distinction between memory and
the present immediacy has a double bearing. On the one hand it discloses
that mind is not impartially aware of all those natural durations to
which it is related by awareness. Its awareness shares in the passage of
nature. We can imagine a being whose awareness, conceived as his private
possession, suffers no transition, although the terminus of his
awareness is our own transient nature. There is no essential reason why
memory should not be raised to the vividness of the present fact; and
then from the side of mind, What is the difference between the present
and the past? Yet with this hypothesis we can also suppose that the
vivid remembrance and the present fact are posited in awareness as in
their temporal serial order. Accordingly we must admit that though we
can imagine that mind in the operation of sense-awareness might be free
from any character of passage, yet in point of fact our experience of
sense-awareness exhibits our minds as partaking in this character.

On the other hand the mere fact of memory is an escape from transience.
In memory the past is present. It is not present as overleaping the
temporal succession of nature, but it is present as an immediate fact
for the mind. Accordingly memory is a disengagement of the mind from the
mere passage of nature; for what has passed for nature has not passed
for mind.

Furthermore the distinction between memory and the immediate present is
not so clear as it is conventional to suppose. There is an intellectual
theory of time as a moving knife-edge, exhibiting a present fact without
temporal extension. This theory arises from the concept of an ideal
exactitude of observation. Astronomical observations are successively
refined to be exact to tenths, to hundredths, and to thousandths of
seconds. But the final refinements are arrived at by a system of
averaging, and even then present us with a stretch of time as a margin
of error. Here error is merely a conventional term to express the fact
that the character of experience does not accord with the ideal of
thought. I have already explained how the concept of a moment
conciliates the observed fact with this ideal; namely, there is a
limiting simplicity in the quantitative expression of the properties of
durations, which is arrived at by considering any one of the abstractive
sets included in the momen