But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest expression for the deepest human experiences in this whole matter of Duration and Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-Time, although, here as with regard to Space, he is deeply indebted to Plotinus. “In thee, O my soul, I measure time,--I measure the impression which passing events make upon thee, who remainest when those events have passed: this present impression then, and not those events which had to pass in order to produce it, do I measure, when I measure time.” “The three times,” tenses, “past, present, and future … are certain three affections in the soul, I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, and the present expectation of future ones.” God possesses “the splendour of ever-tarrying Eternity,” which is “incomparable with never-tarrying times,” since in it “nothing passes, but the content of everything abides simply present.” And in the next life “perhaps our own thoughts also will not be flowing, going from one thing to another, but we shall see all we know simultaneously, in one intuition.” St. Thomas indeed is more positive: “All things will,” in Heaven, “be seen simultaneously and not successively.”[285] (3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate the conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive a perfect Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness of God, we cannot well avoid holding that, in the other life, the clock-time convention will completely cease, and that, though the sense of Duration is not likely completely to disappear, (since, in this life at least, this sense is certainly not merely phenomenal for man, and its entire absence would apparently make man into God), the category of Simultaneity will, as a sort of strong background-consciousness, englobe and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity predominate over the sense of Duration. 2. _The Ultimate Good, concrete, not abstract._ Our second question concerns the kind and degree of variety in unity which we should conceive to characterize the life of God, and of the soul in its God-likeness. Is this type and measure of all life to be conceived as a maximum of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion; as pure thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply reproductive, or also as operative? (1) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing has been more common, than to take the limitations of our earthly conditions, and especially those attendant upon the strictly contemplative, and, still more, those connected with the technically ecstatic states, as so many advantages, or even as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul’s ultimate life.