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Harris, in his Hermes, in his disquisition on Time, gives the distinction between the grammatical or conventional phrase, “Present Time,” and the more philosophical and abstract “Now,” or “Instant.” Quoting Nicephorus Blemmides, Harris would define the former as follows: “Present Time is that which adjoins to the Real Now, or Instant, on either side being a limited time made up of Past and Future; and from its vicinity to that Real Now, said to be Now also itself.” Whilst upon the latter term he remarks: “As every Now or Instant always exists in Time, and without being Time is Time’s bound; the Bound of Completion to the Past, and the Bound of Commencement to the Future; and from hence we may conceive its nature or end, which is to be the medium of continuity between the Past and the Future, so as to render Time, through all its parts, one Intire and Perfect Whole.”

Thus, logically, “Time Present” must be regarded as a mathematical point, having no parts or magnitude, being simply the end of the Past, and the beginning of the Future. Thus, perishing in action and eluding the grasp of thought, it is a nonentity, of which, at best, an intangible and shadowy existence can be predicated:

Dum loquimur fugerit invida

Ætas. Hor.

And we may ask of it, with its carpe diem, its manifold attributes, and imputed influences, as the poet Young does of the King of Terrors:

Why start at Death? Where is he? Death arrived

Is past; not come, or gone, he’s never here.

Night Thoughts, iv.

It is, however, in the more conventional sense that the phrase “Present Time” is generally made use of in writing and conversation. So Johnson, in his well-known passage: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings,” &c. Here we have “the Present” invested with the dignity of individual existence, and compared with the Past and the Future, as having duration or extension with these; as if we should speak of a series of numbers, ascending on each side of nothing to infinity, as being divisible into negative, zero, and positive.

Among coincident forms of expression, on the part of writers who have spoken of the “Present Time” in its more precise and philosophical sense, is the following by Cowley, in a note to one of his “Pindarique Odes:” “There are two sorts of Eternity; from the Present backwards to Eternity, and from the present forwards, called by the Schoolmen Æternitas à parte ante, and Æternitas à parte post. These two make up the whole circle of Eternity, which Present Time cuts like a Diameter.”

Carlyle, in his Essays (“Signs of the Times”), has this knowledgeful passage: “We admit that the present is an important time; as all present time necessarily is. The poorest day that passes over us is the conflux of two Eternities, and is made up of currents that issue from the remotest Past, and flow onwards into the remotest Future. We were wise, indeed, could we discover truly the signs of our own times; and, by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, then, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us for a little on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity may disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavours in it, may also become clearer.”^[1]

Lord Strangford has left these pathetic stanzas:

Time was—when all was fresh, and fair, and bright,

My heart was bounding with delight,

It knew no pain, it felt no aching:

But o’er it all its airy woes

As lightly passed, or briefly staid,

Like the fleet summer-cloud which throws

On sunny lands a moment’s shade,

A momentary darkness making.

Time is—when all is drear, and dim, and wild,

And that gay sunny scene which smiled

With darkest clouds is gloomed and saddened;

When tempest-toss’d on passion’s tide

Reason’s frail bark is madly driven,

Nor gleams one ray its course to guide

From yon o’ercast and frowning heaven,

Till peace is wreck’d and reason maddened.

Time come—but will it e’er restore

The peace my bosom felt before,

And soothe again my aching, tortured breast?

It will, for there is One above

Who bends on all a Father’s eye;

Who hears with all a Father’s love

The broken heart’s repentant sigh,

Calms the vexed heart, and bids the spirit rest.

1. Abridged from an excellent Communication, by William Bates, to Notes and Queries, 2d series, vol. x. p. 245.