The Essential Augustine
where they are. And if that is impossible for me, at least I do know that, wherever they are, they are not there as future or past things, but as present. For if they are there also as future things, they are not yet there, and if they are there as past things, they are already not there. So, wherever they are, whatever they are, they do not exist unless as present things. Yet when past things are recounted as true, they are brought forth from memory, not as the actual things which went on in the past but as words formed from images of these things; and these things have left their traces as it were in the mind while passing through sense perception. In fact my boyhood, which is not now in existence, is in past time, which does not now exist; but when I recall and tell about it, I see its image in present time, for it is still in my memory.
Whether the same explanation also may be given for the prediction of things, so that presently existing images of things which do not yet exist are perceived beforehand, I confess, O my God, that I do not know. This I know clearly: we often think ahead about our future actions and this premeditation is present, while the action which we think over beforehand is not yet in existence, for it is in the future. When we shall have reached it and have begun to do what we were thinking of before, then that action will be in existence, since it will then be not in the future but present.
So in whatever way this mysterious preperception 24. of future things goes on, it is not possible for a thing to be seen unless it is something existing. What exists now is not a future thing but present. Therefore, when future things are said to be seen, the things themselves which do not yet exist, that is, the future things, are not seen, but rather their causes or signs perhaps which now exist. And so they are not future things, but things now present to those who are seeing, from which they foretell future things as conceived by their mind. Again, these conceptions exist now, and those ne predict such things see them as present within themselves. ; Now, let the abundance of such cases suggest some example
O me.
I see the dawn: I foretell that the sun will rise. What I See is present, what I foretell is future; not that the sun is future—it exists now—but rather its rising which is not yet occurring. Yet unless I form an image in my mind of this rising, as I do at this instant when I speak about it, I could not predict it. But the dawn which I see in the sky is not the