Are we justified in opposing to this relative perception of time "our own" time, which is something specific and dependent on our constitution as human beings? Should we not rather adopt the view that this specific time, adapted to our particular pulse-beat, gives only a very limited picture of the world, which is conditioned and determined by the limitations of our own definite intelligence? Is it, perhaps, only a distorted picture, a caricature, of actual occurrences? An intelligence infinitely superior to our own would no longer be dependent on the separate sensations such as are presented to us with the rhythm of the pulse. For such a mind there would be no metronomic foundation in the sequence of occurrences, beyond what represents itself as time to our understanding. He would be situated outside of time in what Thomas Aquinas called the _nunc stans_, in the stationary present, without a retrospect of the past and without expectation of a future. Without the Before and the After, the occurrences of the world would acquire the clearest and simplest meaning, like that given by an equation of identity. What presents itself to us as a "succession" of events would merge together into one whole, just as a succession of numerical calculations become summarized in a rule of calculation, or as a series of logical operations resolves into a logical self-evident truth. If the mind conceived by Laplace actually existed, it would stand above the necessity of introducing time as a quantity into its world-equations, for time is a purely anthropomorphic quantity, produced by our perception, and regulated by our own characteristic pulses. Accordingly, the conception of causality, too, which is indissolubly connected with time, must be regarded as anthropomorphic, as something that we read into, and not out of Nature. We should at least have to recognize that if there is a causality outside ourselves, then we can learn only a minimum about it, and even this only in a world displaced or distorted by the accidental rate of our pulse-beat.