ABSTRACT
Time, much more than space, has been the reason for the philosophical, actually metaphysical, torment beginning with that of Heraclitus and Plato, going through many illustrious minds such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant down, in our own era, to Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson and G. L. S. Shackle. Even some natural scientists have not been satisfied with the idea that time is nothing else but that which is measured by a mechanical pointerreader, a clock. The most vigorous and competent protest came from Sir Arthur Eddington (1928). As we may remember, he argued that time is an element of our cognition much more mysterious than space, a point later accentuated nicely by Robert M. Maclver (1962): 'Time is the greatest of all human mysteries, and whichever way we think about it, we end in an impasse, faced by some great intriguing question to which no answer is forthcoming, since we find no road between the question and its exploration'. On a moment's reflection the reason is evident: we can hold a slice of space between our left and right hands and point out from 'here' to 'here'.
