Jan 28, 2026 07:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 28, 2026 07:28 PM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/when-we-turned-ti...and-future
EXCERPTS: We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine time as anything else. [...] Let’s journey back to Ancient Greece...
[...] Such views of time are cyclical: time comprises a repeating cycle, as events occur, pass, and occur again. They echo processes in nature. Day and night. ... Gould describes [the alternative view of a] linear understanding of history as an ‘important and distinctive’ contribution of Jewish thought. Biblical history helped power linear ideas of time.
Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries [...] Yet in the 19th-century ... the linear model of time gained ground, and thinkers literally began drawing time as a line...
[...] The last development stemmed from mathematics: theories of the fourth dimension. Humans perceive three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. But mathematicians have long theorised there were more. In the 1880s, the mathematician Charles Hinton popularised these ideas, and went further. He didn’t just argue that space has a fourth dimension, he identified time with that dimension...
[....] Within philosophy, conceiving of time as a line led to thinkers debating the reality of the past and future. Picture a line: all its parts, the fractions of ink that make it up, exist. When we picture time as a line, this leads us to think that all its parts exist too. In the 1870s, the German philosopher Hermann Lotze became anxious about this. ‘We speak of Time as a line, but,’ he writes, ‘the conception of a line involves that of a reality belonging equally to all its elements. Time however does not correspond to this.’ For Lotze, if time were a line, it would only ‘possess one real point’: ‘the present’.
Early 20th-century philosophy saw major debates emerge over the reality of the past and future. In my view, these debates were triggered by the new idea that time is a line. On one side of these stood the likes of Lotze, who argued that only the present exists. Henri Bergson also argued for the unreality of the future, attacking the linear conception of time. His very first book, Time and Free Will (1889), argues vehemently that ‘time is not a line’...
[...] On the other side of this debate stood the likes of the British philosopher Victoria Welby, who drew on chronophotography and the fourth dimension to argue that time is literally space. [...] Similarly, Bertrand Russell argued: ‘Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present.’ ... His peer Samuel Alexander also argued for the reality of past, present and future...
[...] Of course, the best development produced by conceiving of time as a line was time travel. People had imagined visiting the past or future in one way or another for centuries – by dreams, or visions – but H G Wells gave it a whole new, scientific spin. His novel The Time Machine (1895) drew directly on Hinton’s ‘fourth dimension’ to explain how we can travel in time. As his fictional time-traveller puts it:
[...] Today, conceiving of time as a line remains widespread. Timelines are everywhere: in the history of evolution, the history of video games, and the history of chocolate. ... Philosophers continue to debate the reality of past and future: just check out this bumper encyclopaedia article on ‘Presentism’, ‘the view that only present things exist’. Time-travel stories run rife...
[...] Historians have largely dropped Victorian faith in the progress of humanity, yet progress stories about particular areas remain. For example, take this timeline: it straightforwardly depicts technological progress over time. All these ideas are powered by the notion that time is a line. Were we to reshape our idea of time, perhaps these other ideas would also find themselves bent into new forms... (MORE - details)
RELATED: The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics
EXCERPTS: We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine time as anything else. [...] Let’s journey back to Ancient Greece...
[...] Such views of time are cyclical: time comprises a repeating cycle, as events occur, pass, and occur again. They echo processes in nature. Day and night. ... Gould describes [the alternative view of a] linear understanding of history as an ‘important and distinctive’ contribution of Jewish thought. Biblical history helped power linear ideas of time.
Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries [...] Yet in the 19th-century ... the linear model of time gained ground, and thinkers literally began drawing time as a line...
[...] The last development stemmed from mathematics: theories of the fourth dimension. Humans perceive three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. But mathematicians have long theorised there were more. In the 1880s, the mathematician Charles Hinton popularised these ideas, and went further. He didn’t just argue that space has a fourth dimension, he identified time with that dimension...
[....] Within philosophy, conceiving of time as a line led to thinkers debating the reality of the past and future. Picture a line: all its parts, the fractions of ink that make it up, exist. When we picture time as a line, this leads us to think that all its parts exist too. In the 1870s, the German philosopher Hermann Lotze became anxious about this. ‘We speak of Time as a line, but,’ he writes, ‘the conception of a line involves that of a reality belonging equally to all its elements. Time however does not correspond to this.’ For Lotze, if time were a line, it would only ‘possess one real point’: ‘the present’.
Early 20th-century philosophy saw major debates emerge over the reality of the past and future. In my view, these debates were triggered by the new idea that time is a line. On one side of these stood the likes of Lotze, who argued that only the present exists. Henri Bergson also argued for the unreality of the future, attacking the linear conception of time. His very first book, Time and Free Will (1889), argues vehemently that ‘time is not a line’...
[...] On the other side of this debate stood the likes of the British philosopher Victoria Welby, who drew on chronophotography and the fourth dimension to argue that time is literally space. [...] Similarly, Bertrand Russell argued: ‘Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present.’ ... His peer Samuel Alexander also argued for the reality of past, present and future...
[...] Of course, the best development produced by conceiving of time as a line was time travel. People had imagined visiting the past or future in one way or another for centuries – by dreams, or visions – but H G Wells gave it a whole new, scientific spin. His novel The Time Machine (1895) drew directly on Hinton’s ‘fourth dimension’ to explain how we can travel in time. As his fictional time-traveller puts it:
There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives ... Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension … It is only another way of looking at Time. Conceiving of time as the fourth dimension of space enables time travel...
Decades later, Wells described the core of his novel as ‘the idea that Time is a fourth dimension and that the normal present is a three-dimensional section of a four-dimensional universe.’ This is pure Hinton, writ large...[...] Today, conceiving of time as a line remains widespread. Timelines are everywhere: in the history of evolution, the history of video games, and the history of chocolate. ... Philosophers continue to debate the reality of past and future: just check out this bumper encyclopaedia article on ‘Presentism’, ‘the view that only present things exist’. Time-travel stories run rife...
[...] Historians have largely dropped Victorian faith in the progress of humanity, yet progress stories about particular areas remain. For example, take this timeline: it straightforwardly depicts technological progress over time. All these ideas are powered by the notion that time is a line. Were we to reshape our idea of time, perhaps these other ideas would also find themselves bent into new forms... (MORE - details)
RELATED: The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics
