Immediate experience provides us with two time-relations among events: they may be simultaneous, or one may be earlier and the other later. These two are both part of the crude data; it is not the case that only the events are given, and their time-order is added by our subjective activity. The time-order, within certain limits, is as much given as the events. In any story of adventure you will find such passages as the following: "With a cynical smile he pointed the revolver at the breast of the dauntless youth. 'At the word _three_ I shall fire,' he said. The words one and two had already been spoken with a cool and deliberate distinctness. The word _three_ was forming on his lips. At this moment a blinding flash of lightning rent the air." Here we have simultaneity--not due, as Kant would have us believe, to the subjective mental apparatus of the dauntless youth, but given as objectively as the revolver and the lightning. And it is equally given in immediate experience that the words _one_ and _two_ come earlier than the flash. These time-relations hold between events which are not strictly instantaneous. Thus one event may begin sooner than another, and therefore be before it, but may continue after the other has begun, and therefore be also simultaneous with it. If it persists after the other is over, it will also be later than the other. Earlier, simultaneous, and later, are not inconsistent with each other when we are concerned with events which last for a finite time, however short; they only become inconsistent when we are dealing with something instantaneous. It is to be observed that we cannot give what may be called _absolute_ dates, but only dates determined by events. We cannot point to a time itself, but only to some event occurring at that time. There is therefore no reason in experience to suppose that there are times as opposed to events: the events, ordered by the relations of simultaneity and succession, are all that experience provides. Hence, unless we are to introduce superfluous metaphysical entities, we must, in defining what mathematical physics can regard as an instant, proceed by means of some construction which assumes nothing beyond events and their temporal relations.