Part I
Time and civil life
Most of us feel intuitively that time goes on forever of its own accord, completely unaffected by anything else, so that if all activity were suddenly to cease time would still continue without any interruption. For many people the way in which we measure time by the clock and the calendar is absolute, and by some it has even been thought that to tamper with either was to court disaster. When, in 1916, Summer Time was first introduced in the United Kingdom by advancing the clock one hour, there were many who objected to interfering with what the popular novelist Marie Corelli called 'God's own time'. Similarly, in 1752, when the British government decided to alter the calendar, so as to bring it into line with that previously adopted by most other countries of Western Europe, and decreed that the day following 2 September should by styled 14 September, many people thought that their lives were being shortened thereby. Some workers actually believed that they were going to lose eleven days' pay. So they rioted and demanded 'Give us back our eleven days!' (The Act of Parliament had, in fact, been carefully worded so as to prevent any injustice in the payment of rents, interest, etc.) The rioting was worst in Bristol, in those days the second larges city in England, where several people were killed.
Even today, when we are all familiar with the idea of altering the time on the clock so as to suit our general convenience, it still comes to many of us as something of a shock when we are first made to realize that there is, for example, a five-hour difference between London and New York, so that when it is ten o'clock in the evening--nearly bedtime, in London--it is only five o'clock in the afternoon in New York. Moreover, even the most experienced and sophisticated among us can suffer the peculiar, and often unpleasant, effects of 'jet-lag' when we fly a long way in an easterly or westerly direction. No less strange, although unaccompanied by any peculiar physiological symptoms, is the effect of crossing the International Date Line, which has been drawn in a zigzag fashion down the Pacific from one pole to the other. For, when a ship or plane on its way from, say, San Francisco to Hong Kong crosses this line it loses a whole day of the calendar because of the time difference of twenty-four hours between any position immediately to the east of the line and any position to the west of it. Although, in this case, there is no need to adjust our watches, we have to discard a day from the week concerned. On the other hand, when we cross the line in the opposite direction we appear to experience an eight-day week, so that if the crossing is made precisely at midnight we live through two Fridays, say, in succession. This means that in going round the world eastwards the number of days occupied on the journey will be one more than the number of days reckoned at the point where the journey begins and ends, each day on the journey being less than twenty-four hours, but if the journey is made westwards the number of days taken will be one less than the number reckoned at the point of commencement, each day on the journey being longer than twenty-four hours. This phenomenon was made the basis of the story Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne , in which after the hero had completed his journey eastwards he thought he had taken over eighty days, but since he omitted to put his calendar back when crossing the Date Line he found on his return that he was one day ahead of the calendar and so he had, after all, completed his journey in the prescribed time.
All these experiences seem strange because they appear to conflict with our intuitive feeling that time is something universal and absolute. What gives rise to these phenomena is the way we choose to measure time and relate it to the way we live. The time kept by us in civil life is based on the rotation of the earth, which gives us our day. Similarly, the earth's motion around the sun gives us our year. If, however, we lived on the moon, we should then find that, since the moon spins on its axis so much more slowly than does the earth, each day as determined by the moon's rotation would in fact be equal to a month. The way in which the terrestrial day is divided up into hours, minutes, and seconds is purely conventional. Similarly the decision whether a given day begins at dawn, sunrise, midday, sunset, or midnight is also a matter of arbitrary choice or social convenience.
Our sense of time
Granted, then, that the time of civil life is measured in a way that happens to suit us on earth but has no absolute or universal significance, what about our inner feeling of time? Is it this that provides us with our intuition of the absolute nature of time? Time certainly is a fundamental characteristic of human experience, but there is no evidence that we have. a special sense of time, as we have of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Our direct experience of time is always of the present, and our idea of time comes from reflecting on this experience. Nevertheless, so long as our attention is concentrated on the present we tend to be unaware of time. A 'sense of time' involves some feeling or awareness of duration, but this depends on our interests and the way in which we focus our attention. If what we are doing interests us, then time seems short, but the more attention we pay to time itself, that is to its duration, the longer it seems. Never does a minute seem so long as when we look at the seconds hand moving round the face of a watch or clock. Clearly, then, our belief in the absolute nature of temporal duration is not an immediate consequence of our experience, but as I have just said comes from reflecting on this experience. Our sense of duration is affected not only by the degree to which we concentrate our attention on what we are doing but by our general physical condition. In particular, it can be distorted by drugs or by our being confined for long periods to cold, dark environments and being deprived of clocks and watches. But the most widely experienced factor that influences our sense of duration is our age, for it is generally recognized that, as we get older, time as registered by the clock and the calendar appears to pass ever more rapidly.
We experience a feeling of duration whenever the present situation is related by us either to our past experiences or to our future expectations and desires. There is no evidence that we are born with any sense of temporal awareness, but our sense of expectation develops before our consciousness of memory. When a very young child cries with hunger he has his first experience of duration, but these temporal experiences are isolated. It has been suggested that the relatively long delay experienced by the young child in acquiring the ability to walk has an important influence on the development of our sense of time, since the child's eagerness to grasp what he cannot reach gives rise to the first primitive notion of time, associated with a space that cannot be crossed.1 Even when the child begins to walk, to reach is also still to wait and hence enhances the feeling of delay associated with expectation. The first intuition of duration appears as an interval which stands between the child and the fulfilment of his desires.
The child's gradual acquisition of temporal concepts can be closely correlated with the development of his use of language. For, although our awareness of time is a product of human evolution, our ideas of time are neither innate nor automatically learned but are intellectual constructions that result from experience and action.2 Up to the age of 18 months or more children appear to live only in the present, and by that age the meaning of 'now' has usually been acquired. Between then and 30 months, although most of the time-related words that children learn to use deal only with the present, they tend to acquire a few words relating to the future, such as soon', but almost none that concern the past. Consequently, the use of 'tomorrow' precedes that of 'yesterday', although at first both are likely to be interpreted as meaning 'not today'. As the child grows older, the relative proportion of present- oriented statements tends to decrease but still predominates, future- oriented statements increase somewhat, but past-oriented statements increase more slowly. Nevertheless, young children have difficulty in acquiring a unified concept of time, for even when the child begins to recognize temporal sequences time remains dependent on his own activities. The gradual acquisition of language, however, not only increases the child's ability to understand and communicate but also enables him to grasp temporal relationships and to extend his ability for temporal conceptualization. For, although awareness of temporal phenomena may seem to be inherent in our personal experience, it involves an abstract conceptual framework which we only gradually learn to construct.3 Even when the child begins to associate time with particular external movements, he is not truly conscious of time until he begins to realize that things bear a relationship not only to each other but also to himself, and this only becomes possible with the development of memory. The child's sense of memory involves not only events in his own experience but, in due course, some in the memory of his parents and eventually events in the history of his social group. It is not until about the age of 8 or later that the relations of temporal order (before and after) are associated with duration so as to lead to the idea of a single common time in which all events happen. It has been found that at the age of 10 only one child in four regards time as an abstract concept independent of actual clocks. Not surprisingly, the ability to grasp this idea depends on the rate of development of the child's intelligence. An experiment performed on children between the ages of 10 and 15, to test whether they thought they had become older when clocks were advanced one hour to 'Summer Time', revealed that at the younger age only one child in four believed that this change of time had had no effect on his age. Only when they are 13 or 14 do most children begin to realize that the time indicated on a clock is a convention.4
This description of the way in which children learn to develop their sense of time applies only to those growing up in Western industrial civilization and not to children in less sophisticated societies. For example, P. M. Bell has reported that when teaching children in Uganda he found that, although they were not unintelligent, they had much greater difficulty than Western children of similar age in judging how long something took to happen, a two-hour journey by bus being said by some to have taken only ten minutes and by others six hours!5 Also, Australian aborigine children of similar mental capacity to white children find it extremely difficult to tell the time by the clock--something that most Western children usually have learned to do successfully by the age of about 6 or 7. The aborigine children can read the hands of the clock as a memory exercise, but they find it difficult to relate the time they read on the clock to the actual time of day. The explanation that has been suggested is that their lives, unlike ours, are not dominated by time.6
Time and mankind
Our sense of time involves some awareness of duration and also of the differences between past, present, and future. There is evidence that our sense of these distinctions is one of the most important mental faculties distinguishing man from all other living creatures. For we have good reason to believe that all animals except man live in a continual present. The possession by animals of some sense of memory, as shown, for example, by dogs which are inclined to give vent to the wildest joy on seeing their owners after a long separation, does not necessitate any image of the past as such. It is sufficient for the dog to recognize its owner.
Similarly, there is no firm evidence that animals have any sense of the future. In general any actions of theirs that might be thought to bear on this question seem to be purely instinctive, although this conclusion is not quite so obvious in the case of the higher apes, particularly the chimpanzee. The problem was considered very carefully by Wolfgang Koehler in the course of his famous investigation of the mentality of apes. He studied cases where chimpanzees undertook, with a view to some final goal, preparatory work that lasted a long time and in itself afforded no visible approach to the desired end. In such cases it seemed at first that the animal might have some rudimentary notion of the future. Nevertheless, Koehler came to the conclusion that all such behaviour by the highest apes could be explained, to quote his own words, 'more directly from a consideration of the present only'.7 In particular, after a careful analysis of experiments in which chimpanzees readily responded to the opportunity given them to postpone eating until they had accumulated a large supply of food to eat later in some quiet corner free from disturbance, Koehler could find no reason for interpreting their conduct as evidence for a sense of the future. Instead of the animal being spurred on by some feeling of what it will be like later when eating the food, he believed that the chimpanzee's behaviour was simply a response to its instinctive desire to get as much food as possible now. More recently, in his detailed monograph Animal Thought, Stephen Walker has confirmed Koehler's views and has concluded that it is surprisingly difficult to produce convincing experimental proof that any animal has any memory or foresight at all.8
Nevertheless, the conclusion that a sense of time is peculiar to mankind needs careful evaluation. For, whereas in the absence of any incontrovertible counter-evidence we have good reason to deny this faculty to animals, it has been claimed that there are human beings who also manage very well without it. The classic example that has often been cited is that of the Hopi of Arizona, whose language was studied in great detail by Benjamin Lee Whorf.9 He concluded that the Hopi language contains no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time or any of its aspects. Instead of the concepts of space and time the Hopi use two other basic states which Whorf denoted by the terms 'objective' and 'subjective', respectively. The objective state comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, with no distinction being made between present and past, although everything that we call future is excluded. The subjective state comprises all that we would regard as mental or spiritual, including everything that for us is future, much of which the Hopi regard as predestined, at least in essence. It also includes an aspect of the present, namely that which is beginning to be revealed or done, for example starting an action such as going to sleep. The objective state includes all intervals and distances and in particular the temporal relations between events that have already happened. The subjective state, on the other hand, comprises nothing corrresponding to the sequences and successions that we find in the objective state. Unlike English, the Hopi language prefers verbs to nouns, but its verbs have no tenses. The Hopi do not need terms that refer to space or time. Terms that for English-speakers refer to these concepts are replaced by expressions concerning extension, operation, and cyclic process if they refer to the objective realm. Terms that refer to the future, the psychic-mental, the mythical, and the conjectural are replaced by expressions of subjectivity. Whorf claims that, as a result, the Hopi language gets along perfectly without tenses for its verbs.
Whorfs' contention that 'the Hopi language contains no reference to 'time', either explicit or implicit, is, however, too sweeping.10 For there is a temporal distinction between the two basic forms of Hopi thought. Instead of the three temporal states--past, present, and future--the Hopi imagine two states which between them comprise our past, present, and future. In so far as the Hopi recognize implicitly a distinction between past and future, they cannot be said to live only in the present. They have some sense of time, although their fundamental intuition of time is not the same as the one evolved in Europe. Nevertheless, the Hopi have successfully developed an agricultural and ceremonial calendar, based on astronomical lore, that is sufficiently precise for particular festivals seldom to fall more than two days from the norm.11
Similarly, as has been pointed out by Evans-Pritchard, time has a different significance for the Azande of southern Sudan than it had for him. From their behaviour he concluded that for them present and future overlap, so that a man's future health and happiness depend on future conditions that are regarded as already existing. Consequently, it is believed that the mystical forces which produce these conditions can be tackled here and now. When the oracles indicate that a man will fall ill in the near future his state is already bad, his future being already a part of present time. Although the Azande cannot explain these matters, they are content to believe them and act upon them.12
Another Sudanese race studied by Evans-Pritchard, the Nuer, who live on both banks of the White Nile, have no equivalent of our word 'time' and cannot speak of it as if it were something that passes and can be saved or wasted. Their points of reference in time are provided by their social activities. 'Events [for them] follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to correspond with precision.'13 The Nuer have no units of time such as hours or minutes, for they do not measure time but think only in terms of successions of activities. So many of these involve their cattle that Evans-Pritchard speaks of their 'cattle- clock'. Years are referred to by the floods, pestilences, famines, wars, and so on occurring in them. In due course the names given to the years are forgotten and all events beyond the range of this crude historical record come to be regarded as having occurred long ago. Historical time based on a sequence of events that are of great significance for a whole tribe goes back further than the historical time of smaller groups, but in
Evans-Pritchard's opinion it never covers a period of more than about fifty years and the further back from the present the fewer and vaguer are its points of reference.14 Distance between events is not reckoned by the Nuer in terms of temporal concepts but in terms relating to social structure, notably what Evans-Pritchard calls the 'age-set system', all boys 'initiated' during a number of successive years belonging to a single age-set. At the time of Evans-Pritchard's investigation of this system he found members of six sets alive. Although he was unable fully to elucidate the way in which an individual actually perceives time, since the subject 'bristles with difficulties', he concluded that for the Nuer the perception of time is no more than the movement of persons, often as groups, through the social structure. Consequently, it does not yield a true impression of temporal distances between events like that produced by our techniques of dating. In particular, the temporal distance between the beginning of the world and the present day remains fixed. Time- reckoning is essentially a conceptualization of the social structure, the points of reference being a projection into the past of actual relations between social groups. 'It is less a means of co-ordinating events than of co-ordinating relationships, and is therefore mainly a looking- backwards, since relationships must be explained in terms of the past.'15
These and other examples reveal that just as our intuition of space is not unique, for we now know that there is no unique geometry that we must necessarily apply to space, so there is no unique intuition of time that is common to all mankind. Not only primitive people but relatively advanced civilizations too have assigned different degrees of significance to the temporal mode of existence and to the importance or otherwise of temporal perspective. In short, time in all its aspects has been regarded in many conceptually distinct ways.