TIME: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.
Harris, in his Hermes, in his disquisition on Time, gives the distinction between the grammatical or conventional phrase, “Present Time,” and the more philosophical and abstract “Now,” or “Instant.” Quoting Nicephorus Blemmides, Harris would define the former as follows: “Present Time is that which adjoins to the Real Now, or Instant, on either side being a limited time made up of Past and Future; and from its vicinity to that Real Now, said to be Now also itself.” Whilst upon the latter term he remarks: “As every Now or Instant always exists in Time, and without being Time is Time’s bound; the Bound of Completion to the Past, and the Bound of Commencement to the Future; and from hence we may conceive its nature or end, which is to be the medium of continuity between the Past and the Future, so as to render Time, through all its parts, one Intire and Perfect Whole.”
Thus, logically, “Time Present” must be regarded as a mathematical point, having no parts or magnitude, being simply the end of the Past, and the beginning of the Future. Thus, perishing in action and eluding the grasp of thought, it is a nonentity, of which, at best, an intangible and shadowy existence can be predicated:
Dum loquimur fugerit invida
Ætas. Hor.
And we may ask of it, with its carpe diem, its manifold attributes, and imputed influences, as the poet Young does of the King of Terrors:
Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived
Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.
Night Thoughts, iv.
It is, however, in the more conventional sense that the phrase “Present Time” is generally made use of in writing and conversation. So Johnson, in his well-known passage: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings,” &c. Here we have “the Present” invested with the dignity of individual existence, and compared with the Past and the Future, as having duration or extension with these; as if we should speak of a series of numbers, ascending on each side of nothing to infinity, as being divisible into negative, zero, and positive.