/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15029650
We can imagine a being whose awareness suffers no transition of passage. 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?

We can suppose that the vivid remembrance and the present fact are posited in awareness as in their temporal serial order. 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.

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, in point of fact our experience of sense-awareness exhibits our minds as partaking in this character. How curious. It is almost as if a duration has within itself a past and a future.