The Essential Augustine (continued)
remains after they have passed away, not the things which have passed away in order to produce it. This I measure when I measure periods of time. Therefore, either these
[mental dispositions] are periods of time, or what I measure is not time.
But how is it when we measure periods of silence and say that this silence took as much time as that spoken sound did—do we not direct the attention of our cogitation to the measure of the voice, as if it were sounding, so that we can report something about the intervals of silence in the whole space of time? For even when the voice and lips of the speaker have stopped, we continue to go over, in the act of cogitation, poems, verses, any form of speech, and any means whatever of measuring out motions, and this is the way we report on temporal intervals, how one stands in relation to another, for it is as if we spoke and they were actually sounding. If a person wanted to utter a rather long spoken tone, and decided by thinking it over in advance how long it would be, he has obviously gone through this space of time in silence and then, committing it to his memory, he begins to utter the note which sounds until it reaches the terminus that has been previously determined. Nay, rather, it has sounded and it will sound. For that part of it which is already over certainly has sounded, but the part which remains will sound; and that is how it is completed, while present mental awareness [intentio] pushes the future over into the past by decreasing the future and increasing the past, until through the eating up of the future it all becomes past.
But how is the future which does not yet exist de37. creased or eaten up, or how does the past which is no longer existing increase, unless because of the fact that three functions occur in the mind which is doing this? It looks ahead, it attends, and it remembers—in such a way that what it looks forward to passes through what it is attending to into what it is remembering. Who denies that future things are not yet existing? Yet there is now in the mind an expectation of future things. Who denies that past things are already nonexistent? Yet there is still in mind the memory of things past. Who denies that present time lacks extent, for it passes away in an instant, like a point? Yet attention lasts on and, through it, what will be continues to go on into that which is no longer here. So the nonexistent future is not a long time, but a long future period is a long expectation of the future; nor is past time long for it is nonexis-