intimately acquainted with and perfectly know, when they are considered
in an abstract way, appear strangely difficult and incomprehensible.
Time, place, and motion, taken in particular or concrete, are what
everybody knows, but, having passed through the hands of a metaphysician,
they become too abstract and fine to be apprehended by men of ordinary
sense. Bid your servant meet you at such a time in such a place, and he
shall never stay to deliberate on the meaning of those words; in
conceiving that particular time and place, or the motion by which he is
to get thither, he finds not the least difficulty. But if time be taken
exclusive of all those particular actions and ideas that diversify the
day, merely for the continuation of existence or duration in abstract,
then it will perhaps gravel even a philosopher to comprehend it.

98. DILEMMA.--For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea
of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows
uniformly and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in
inextricable difficulties. I have no notion of it at all, only I hear
others say it is infinitely divisible, and speak of it in such a manner
as leads me to entertain odd thoughts of my existence; since that
doctrine lays one under an absolute necessity of thinking, either that he
passes away innumerable ages without a thought, or else that he is
annihilated every moment of his life, both which seem equally absurd.
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the sucession of ideas in
our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be
estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that
same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul
always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his
thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation,
will, I believe, find it no easy task.