to work very cautiously
"intrinsically it may be called time, but one cannot really call it
time, as time does not consist in itself of real parts but is merely
divided by us into parts to suit our own convenience," only a real
filling up of time with distinct facts makes it capable of
calculation. It is impossible to see the significance of piling up an
empty duration. But it does not matter anyway. The question is whether
the universe in this presupposed condition continues, that is
persists, through a period of time. We have long known that it is
useless to try and measure such empty space and to calculate without
plan or aim and just because of the tiresomeness of such a proceeding
Hegel calls this infinity "miserable." According to Herr Duehring time
exists only by virtue of change, not change in and through time.
Because time is different from change and independent of it, we can
measure it by the changes, because in order to measure we need
something different from that which is to be measured. And the time in
which no recognisible changes take place is very far from being no
time, on the other hand since it is free from other ingredients, it is
pure, that is to say, true time. Indeed if we want to contemplate time
as a pure concept separated from all foreign admixture, we are obliged
to eliminate all the various events which occur in time, either
successively or simultaneously, and thus imagine a time in which
nothing occurs. By this means we have not permitted the concept time
to be overcome by the general concept of existence, but we have
thereby arrived at a pure time concept. All these contradictions and
impossibilities are mere child's play compared with the confusion into
which he plunges the universe with its self-sufficient commencement.
If the universe was in a condition in which no change occurred in it,
how did it ever manage to get from that state to one of change?
Moreover, an absolute condition of absence of change existing from
eternity cannot possibly get out of that state unaided so as to pass
over to a condition of progress and change. A first cause of motion
must therefore have come from the outside, from beyond the universe,
which caused the movement. This first cause of motion is clearly only
another term for God, The God and the Beyond of which Herr Duehring
fancied that he had so nicely settled in his scheme of the universe,
return sharpened and deepened in his natural philosophy.

Furth