e taken up by
its vibration. It is not necessary to believe that the duration that we
actually experience as a second must itself be capable of being divided
up into the number of parts indicated by the denominator of the fraction
that we use in indicating such a time, and that each of these parts must
be perceived as duration.

There is, then, a sense in which we may affirm that time is infinitely
divisible. But we must remember that apparent time--the time presented
in any single experience of duration--is never infinitely divisible; and
that real time, in any save a relative sense of the word, is not a single
experience of duration at all. It is a recognition of the fact that
experiences of duration may be substituted for each other without
assignable limit.

(4) But what shall we say to the last problem--to the question how we can
be conscious of time at all, when the parts of time are all successive?
How can we even have a consciousness of "crude" time, of apparent time,
of duration in any sense of the word, when duration must be made up of
moments no two of which can exist together and no one of which alone can
constitute time? The past is not now, the future is not yet, the present
is a mere point, as we are told, and cannot have parts. If we are
conscious of time as past, present, and future, must we not be conscious
of a series as a series when every member of it save one is nonexistent?
Can a man be conscious of the nonexistent?

The difficulty does seem a serious one, and yet I venture to affirm that,
if we examine it carefully, we shall see that it is a difficulty of our
own devising. The argument quietly makes an assumption--and makes it
gratuitously--with which any consciousness of duration is incompatible,
and then asks us how there can be such a thing as a consciousness of
duration.

The assumption is that _we can be conscious only of the existent_, and
this, written out a little more at length, reads as follows: _we can be
conscious only of the now existent_, or, in other words _of the present_.
Of course, this determines from the outset that we cannot be conscious of
the past and the future, of duration.

The past and the future are, to be sure, nonexistent from the point of
view of the present; but it should be remarked as well that the present
is nonexistent from the point of view of the past or the future. If we
are talking of time at all we are talking of that no two parts of which
are