ABSTRACT
Hume’s account of how we come to conceive and perceive time grapples with ways in which time is unlike space: all perceptions are disposed in time, and time is an order of coming into being and passing away. It also draws conclusions that are unparalleled in Hume’s account of space. Hume divided his discussion into two parts. The second, nominally concerned with time “as it is conceived in the imagination,” falls broadly into line with his account of space. It argues that, the differences between time and space notwithstanding, time is also a manner of disposition, though of perceptions of all sorts. The first, nominally concerned with time “in its first appearance to the mind,” argues that there can be no experience of time where nothing changes and goes on to argue that unchanging objects cannot properly be supposed to endure. This chapter studies the notions of succession and moments of time that fall out of Hume’s account of time “as it is conceived in the imagination” and shows that Hume had no good evidence for the doctrines that there can be no experience of time where nothing changes and that unchanging objects cannot endure. He was also unable to establish that our experience of temporal passage in the absence of change is only “fictional.”
