Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !

Updated: June 18, 2025


There are durations of the same family as the given duration which overlap it but are not contained in it. Consider an abstractive set of such durations. Such a set defines a moment which is just as much without the duration as within it. Such a moment is a boundary moment of the duration.

Before there were hour-glasses and clepsydras, most phenomena could be estimated as to their durations and intervals, with no greater precision than degrees of hardness can be estimated by the fingers. Until a thermometric scale was contrived, men's judgments respecting relative amounts of heat stood on the same footing with their present judgments respecting relative amounts of sound.

When we go beyond the earth into the realm of the stars all efforts toward understanding the ranges of space or the durations of time are quite beyond the efforts of man. Even the distance of about two hundred and forty thousand miles which separates us from the moon can not be grasped by even the greater minds.

But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on human events, he sought another key to historical changes in the influence of numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, but working them out in a way of his own. He enumerates the durations of the lives of many famous men, to show that they can be expressed by powers of 7 and 9, or the product of these numbers.

In passage we reach a connexion of nature with the ultimate metaphysical reality. The quality of passage in durations is a particular exhibition in nature of a quality which extends beyond nature. For example passage is a quality not only of nature, which is the thing known, but also of sense-awareness which is the procedure of knowing.

The recognition of the fact of an indefinite number of families of parallel durations is what differentiates the concept of nature here put forward from the older orthodox concept of the essentially unique time-systems. Its divergence from Einstein's concept of nature will be briefly indicated later.

So far the passage of nature has been considered in connexion with the passage of durations; and in this connexion it is peculiarly associated with temporal series. We must remember however that the character of passage is peculiarly associated with the extension of events, and that from this extension spatial transition arises just as much as temporal transition.

Accordingly there are no maximum durations and no minimum durations. Thus there is no atomic structure of durations, and the perfect definition of a duration, so as to mark out its individuality and distinguish it from highly analogous durations over which it is passing, or which are passing over it, is an arbitrary postulate of thought.

Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Erostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana; he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.

Thus two situations of a sense-object, either in the same duration or in different durations, are not necessarily connected by any continuous passage of events which are also situations of that sense-object.

Word Of The Day

ghost-tale

Others Looking