ABSTRACT
Time is not only the concomitant of consciousness, but the condition of choice and the passage from aspiration to achievement. The connexion has been known much longer than that between time and probability, but has been subject to many of the same difficulties and confusions. The argument from consciousness, like the argument from change, secures the topological properties of denseness, continuity and linearity; the argument from agency is less convincing on these scores, but decisive on the equally important ones of the direction and the modality of time. Modal logic enables to formulate in logical terms the difference between the future and the past, and hence pave the way to a more adequate characterization of time than the tenuous space-like entity generated by the rational theory of clocks. Moreover modal logic has until very recently been an obscure and opaque subject, quite incapable of casting any light on any field.
