ABSTRACT
St Augustine allowed himself to be confused about the present. He may be forgiven. He was impelled to maintain the present both to be on a par with the past and future, and therefore to be an interval, and to be in a special category of its own, and to be an instant, the unique instant dividing the future from the past. Both views may be maintained, but not both at once, or inconsistency is bound to result. Nevertheless, St Augustine may be forgiven. There are strong linguistic pressures, even stronger in Latin and Greek than in English, in both directions, and quite apart from the problem of whether the present shall be regarded as an interval or as an instant, there are difficulties about the meaning of the words 'past', 'present' and 'future'. For behind St Augustine's dialectic lies the mathematical fact that an infinite set of nested present intervals defines a present instant.
