If, however, we consider what is common to the ordering of both classes, and postulate the existence of an ordering relation for the whole content of the mind, perceptual and non-perceptual, we shall not have great difficulty in identifying this formative relation with ordering in time.
Time thus appears to us as an abstraction from that growth, change, activity, which is the first characteristic of which the mind becomes aware, when it looks into its own content; it is an abstraction from the ordering of the whole content of the mind. We may therefore define it as a formative principle, by the aid of which the whole content of the mind can be divided into slices common to its perceptual and its non-perceptual part, and which enables us to arrange the whole content of the mind in a one-dimensional continuum of these slices in such a way, that, of any two of them, we may say that one is after the other, and of any three of them, that one is between the other two.
29. This view conforms to the fact that the mind is able to say of any two parts A and B of its content whether they are (in the mind) contemporaneous or not, and, in the latter case, whether A is after B, or B after A. This fact remains a fact, whatever metaphysical explanation we give of it; it will depend upon our metaphysical position whether we ascribe to the mind the capacity to distinguish the temporal order of two different parts of its content, or to import this order between the parts; for us the important thing is that in any case this order ultimately exists, and from our standpoint we can regard the fact of the temporal ordering of the mind’s different parts and the division of the mind’s content into elements which are so ordered, as a basic datum which admits of no modification. The type of order under which the whole content of the mind[1] is arranged in a time-series we call inner time.
30. The elements of the continuum which arises with the temporal ordering of the mind’s content we will call instants: the instant of this definition is not the instant of time of current phraseology, but the whole content of the mind of which we can say that it is simultaneous with a given element of experience. An instant in this sense will have a perceptual or a non-perceptual content; since for our purpose only the former is important, it will be as well to separate the two and give a special name to the perceptual content of an instant,
- ↑ It is perhaps hardly necessary to emphasise that the term “content of the mind” is chosen purely for want of a better expression: it must not be taken to signify that the mind is a kind of receptacle, in which thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and the like, are contained.
