We fall in with the assumption, it seems, because we know very well that we are not directly conscious of a remote past and a remote future. We represent these to ourselves by means of some proxy--we have present memories of times long past and present anticipations of what will be in the time to come. Moreover, we use the word "present" very loosely; we say the present year, the present day, the present hour, the present minute, or the present second. When we use the word thus loosely, there seems no reason for believing that there should be such a thing as a direct consciousness that extends beyond the present. It appears reasonable to say: No one can be conscious save of the present. It should be remembered, however, that the generous present of common discourse is by no means identical with the ideal point between past and future dealt with in the argument under discussion. We all say: I now see that the cloud is moving; I now see that the snow is falling. But there can be no moving, no falling, no change, in the timeless "now" with which we have been concerned. Is there any evidence whatever that we are shut up, for all our immediate knowledge, to such a "now"? There is none whatever. The fact is that this timeless "now" is a product of reflective thought and not a something of which we are directly conscious. It is an ideal point in the real time of which this chapter has treated, the time that is in a certain sense infinitely divisible. It is first cousin to the ideal mathematical point, the mere limit between two lines, a something not perceptible to any sense. We have a tendency to carry over to it what we recognize to be true of the very different present of common discourse, a present which we distinguish from past and future in a somewhat loose way, but a present in which there certainly is the consciousness of change, of duration. And when we do this, we dig for ourselves a pit into which we proceed to fall. We may, then, conclude that we are directly conscious of more than the present, in the sense in which Augustine used the word. We are conscious of _time_, of "crude" time, and from this we can pass to a knowledge of real time, and can determine its parts with precision. [1] Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15. III. PROBLEMS TOUCHING THE MIND CHAPTER VIII WHAT IS THE MIND? 30. PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.--The soul or mind, that something to which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to call it in question. That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind is, he may be quite unable to say.