II. Space refers solely to the corporeal world, under only one aspect, that of continuity. Time extends to all that is successive, corporeal or incorporeal.
III. Consequently, the idea of space exists only in the geometrical order, of which it is the basis. The idea of time is mingled with every thing, and more especially with our own acts.
IV. Our soul, when reflecting upon itself, can totally prescind space, and forget all its relations with extended objects; but it cannot prescind time, which it finds necessary even to its own operations.
This last difference is a great help to the understanding in what the idea of time consists; and we venture to recommend it to the attention and memory of the reader.
[CHAPTER IV.]
DEFINITION OF TIME.
22. Time is duration; but duration without something which endures, is an absurdity. There can then be no time without something existing. The duration which we conceive, after reducing every thing to nihility, is a vain imagination; it is not an idea, but is rather in contradiction with ideas.
An important consequence flows from this; it is, that time in itself, cannot be defined with absolute elimination of every thing to which it refers. Time, then, has no proper existence; and separated from beings is annihilated.