/*—The Presidential Address

THE UNREALITY OF TIME

by T.L.S. Sprigge

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W hen I first joined the Aristotelian Society in 1960 or there-
abouts it would have been a bold person who said that time
was unreal. But times (speaking sub specie temporis) have
changed and since many philosophers today seem within an ace of
saying it, perhaps a presidential address may be used to say it
boldly.
Discussion of the matter usually centres on McTaggart's
argument. Personally I agree to a great extent with McTaggart's
conclusion that the reality of time, in the ordinary sense, requires
the reality of the A series, and that this being incoherent time is
unreal, though there is a real series, the C series, which is the reality
underlying it. However, I think McTaggart's own conception of the
nature of the C series hopeless, and his argument for the unreality
of the A series question begging. Rather than argue this here I shall
advance a much simpler argument for the unreality of time.

II
What is the proverbial plain man's answer to the question: Are past,
present and future all equally real? Probably that only the present
is fully real, that the past has a kind of secondary reality, and that
the future is hardly real at all.
But what can 'real' mean in such a context? A plausible inter-
pretation is 'absolutely determinate in character', with degree of
reality measured by proximity to this. Such a sense of 'real' is
suggested by Michael Dummett's distinction between 'realism'

* Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in the Senior Common Room, Birkbeck College,
London on Monday 7th October, 1991 at 8.15 p.m.
2 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

and 'anti-realism'. Personally I think this terminology unfortunate.

For one thing there are views about things which are realist in this
sense but not so in a more traditional sense. Thus an idealist, as
opposed to a realist, view of physical objects can still hold that
every proposition about physical objects is definitely true or
definitely false. The existence of physical objects may depend
upon actual or possible consciousness of them and yet every
proposition about them have a definite truth-value.
Suppose, however, that one does identify 'reality' with

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determinateness, and 'degree of reality' with degree thereof, and
questions a plain man with this explained. Provided he realizes that
it is strictly truth, and not its accessibility, which is in question I think
he would now say that the present and past are both equally real, but
that the future is less real. For the usual view is, surely, that present
and past are absolutely determinate, while the future is to a great
extent indeterminate or open. Let us call this THE STANDARD
VIEW.1

in
There are two main alternatives to the standard view which I shall
call determinationism and the philosophy of the present.
DETERMINATIONISM says that the future is just as
determinate as past and present. All three have a determinate
character. The only difference is that a human knows less of what
lies before, than of what is over.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRESENT denies that even the
past is necessarily determinate. For it is there only in the sense that
it is recalled, reported or evidenced in an unambiguous way. Where
evidence as to what happened is non-existent, there is no definite
truth of the matter.
The philosophy of the present tends to turn into
PREDICTIONISM, for which propositions about the past are
tantamount to predictions about the upshot of actual or possible
future research. This similarly implies its likely indeterminacy. I

1 Among philosophers A.N. Prior evidently takes this view. See Time and Modality
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) and Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967). However, I am not sure that he distinguishes between determinism and
determinationism (see below).
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 3

shall largely lump these two together as I have much the same to
say about both.2

IV
The philosophy of the present and predictionism are such weird
views that I doubt whether many people really hold them. Can
anyone (not so confident of his fame that he is sure it will be
recorded or recalledfor ever) really believe that it may one day not

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even be true that he ever existed? Or think of some trivial fact
about a present or recent experience of yours, which you plan to
keep private, and which it is evident no one could ever discover in
the far future or would even wish to know about. Can you really
say to yourself that one day it won't even be the case that you had
that experience—not of course, that it will be the case that you did
not have it, but simply that nothing of that sort will be the case at
all?

V
If you agree with me that such ideas are absurd you will have to
allow that the past can possess quite determinate features which no
one can now or henceforth ever know about and will presumably
agree that it is similarly determinate in all kindred details.
It should be emphasised that for a certain kind of idealist it may
be doubtful whether questions of physical fact, never put to the test,
are determinate, and yet be quite determinate what experiences
have ever actually occurred. So since my concern is with the status
of past, present and future vis-a-vis one another rather than with the
status of the physical world, I shall regard such an idealist as
holding the standard view if he holds that there is an absolutely
determinate truth about what experiences have been had by
conscious subjects up till now, but that there is no absolutely
determinate truth about what experiences may occur for some

2 C.I. Lewis and the early A.J. Ayer were both predictionists but seem not to have
concluded that the past may be indeterminate. But probably they should have done.
Dummett clearly does associate predictionism with 'anti-realism' about the past. See
Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), Chapter 21.
G.H. Mead, and in an odd way at times Schopenhauer, seem to have espoused the
philosophy of the present.
4 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

conscious subject or other in the future, and as a determinationist

if he thinks that the truth about what experiences any conscious
subjects have had, are having, and will have is absolutely
determinate. In either case he only thinks that propositions about
past matters of physical fact which were never put to the test have
no definite truth value because he rejects the ultimate reality of
unexperienced physical things, not because he thinks there is any
special indeterminacy about the past. Thus he does not hold, as the
philosopher of the present and predictionist must do, that there may

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be definite truths now about matters concerning which one day the
truth will be indeterminate.

VI

In view of the strangeness of denying that once something has

happened it must always remain true that it did so, it seems
reasonable to take the proposition that the past is as determinate in
character as the present as a premiss in our further reasonings. That
leaves us with a choice between the standard view, according to
which there is a determinate truth about every detail of the present
and past, while the truth about the future may be partly
indeterminate, and determinationism for which there is an equally
determinate truth about past, present and future. It is worth
remarking that it is a little misleading to say that (on the standard
view) these propositions do not have a truth value now if that
suggests that in some sense there is a future time, to be contrasted
with now, at which they do have a truth value. The idea is rather
that there is no such thing as the future time they concern, about
which there can be any truth or falsehood. There will come a time
when there will be a truth about such matters, but we must not look
upon that time as something which is somehow there in some
larger reality which it is the point of the word 'now' to distinguish
from the present time. It is a very difficult matter, however, to put
this point clearly without spending longer on it than I can afford.3

3 A more radical view is that there will one day be truths which are not as yet even of
indeterminate truth value, since they will concern particulars which do not as yet exist.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 5

VII

It is important not to confuse determinationism with determinism.

The determinist holds that the future is already determined
causally, i.e. that a definite truth about its every detail follows from
the conjunction of laws of nature and propositions about what has
occurred to date. This is by no means implied by the
determinationist's view that there is a determinate truth about the
future.

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This can be seen from the fact that the determinateness of a past
time does not depend on its being connected with what has
happened since then in such a way that it could be read off from the
present, with proper knowledge of laws of change. If you doubt
this imagine space divided into two halves, and ask whether there
cannot be a determinate truth about what each half contains though
there is no principle for reading off the contents of the one from the
other.

VIII

So the question: Is the future determinate? is not the same as the

question: Is it determined? It could be the one without the other.
Moreover, there is even a sense in which it could be determined
without being determinate. It could be that determinism is true of
the world so far, and can be expected to be true in the future,
without this being as yet an actual truth about the future rather than
the best surmise about it. Indeed even if all events so far have
followed on each other by laws possessing some kind of necessity
which, as such, must equally govern all future events, perhaps it
need not therefore be an actual truth about them as yet that they will
be as they must be.

IX

A more vulgar fallacy than the confusion of determinationism with

determinism is its confusion with a certain sort of fatalism. Such a
fatalism is not often clearly stated, but it is presumably the real gist
of 'what will be, will be' when it figures as a piece of popular
wisdom.
6 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

The fatalist, in the sense I have in mind, believes that all really
important events in one's future are settled, in their broad
character, and that the choices one makes can only alter the details
of the way in which they happen. Either your number is up today
or it is not, so there is no point in being careful. No need for caution
when you cross the road—it's either your death day or it is not.
So for fatalism you have no choice as to what will happen so far
as that seriously matters, because these things are doomed to
happen whatever you do. Of course, no such claim is made either

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by determinism or determinationism which in themselves imply no
scepticism about counterfactuals about what would happen if one
were to act, or to have acted, otherwise than one will or did.
Fatalism, in this sense, certainly seems absurd (though Tolstoi's
view of history may be a version of it) and it is hard to see anything
in its favour. The only reason for mentioning it is to be quite clear
that it is not implied either by determinism or determinationism.

X
Sometimes philosophers speak of what they call logical fatalism.
This is conceived as a doctrine about the settled nature of the future
supposedly derivable from the law of excluded middle (or of
bivalence). This is taken as implying such things as that, for every
day in the future, the proposition that you will die on that day is
either true or false, so that it's settled 'already' when you will die.
It would be a mistake to confuse determinationism as I
understand it with such logical fatalism.4 If the merely logical
fatalist accepts (as he may or may not think he does) the
determinationist's claim, as it is intended, he has no right to do so.
For his argument only establishes it, if it establishes it at all, in a
much weaker sense in which it is of little consequence.
For if the sole ground for regarding the future as determinate lay
in the logical fatalist's facile application of the law of excluded
middle then its claim that there is a determinate truth about the
future could be defused of any real metaphysical importance as
follows:

4 For a discussion of logical fatalism of the kind I have in mind see Alan R. White, Truth
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 48-56.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 7

The logical fatalist's point is simply this. There is a rule of

language according to which any well formed proposition must be
described as 'either true or false, though not both'. Thus 'John
Major will die in the year 2030' must, as a matter of convention, be
regarded as having a truth-value, though one which is unknown.
When that year has passed, then (if not before) people will be able
to say that they now know which truth-value it had. It will be
inappropriate to say that it has now acquired that truth value, for it
is simply linguistically more correct to say that it has now been

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found to have that truth value.
If the logical fatalist is right that there is such a rule of language
(and I am not particularly concerned with the question whether
there is or not) it has no real implications for the determinacy of the
future in any metaphysically important sense. Philosophically one
could still hold that there is no deep way in which John Major's
death in some particular year in the future is a fact in the same sense
as that in which the death of Benjamin Disraeli in 1881 is. For, so
one may say, all it amounts to is that, when John Major eventually
dies, it will be more correct to say that certain propositions about
when he would and wouldn't die have turned out to have been true,
rather than that they have become true. (One might even claim that
a like convention applies to 'fact'.) There is a vast gap between
speaking of the future as determinate on the basis of such an
alleged linguistic convention, and saying that it is determinate
because the future really is a region of reality as definite in itself as
the past. So we must neither reject determinationism because we
think logical fatalism specious, nor suppose ourselves to have
accepted it because we think logical fatalism sound.

XI

I now turn to the case I wish to make for determinationism. I need

first to establish some points about the nature of the Past which, as
it seems to me, are implied in the acceptance that the truth about it
is determinate.
To me, at least, it seems evident that there can be no genuinely true
judgements (propositions or whatever) about matters of concrete
fact, unless there is some bit of reality whose existence and character
make them true. Maybe there are better ways of putting the point but
8 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

unless the gist of what I mean is accepted, true judgements are

deprived of their role of saying how things really are or even of
relating us appropriately to fact. To think correctly about some
particular matter of fact is to be right about, at least in the sense of
somehow relating one's thought appropriately to, the existence and
character of something, and that something cannot be nothing.
If so, a judgement about a past matter of fact which is true,
must be so because in some way it identifies something and
characterises it correctly, or at least somehow relates our thought

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appropriately to something, and this something cannot be merely
nothing. Some philosophers effectively proffer as that something
the so-called present physical or psychical evidences for the past
occurrence, or the evidence which will become available to us if
we enquire. But this is to relapse back to that philosophy of the
present or predictionism which we have already rejected, for it
implies that in the absence of appropriate present, or in future
available, evidence the truth about the past may be indeterminate.
And in any case it is surely the very past event or past state of
some continuant which is the something which our thoughts about
the past correctly identify and characterise (or appropriately relate
our thought to) if they are true. The evidence is only an indication
to us that we have succeeded in doing this, not that which the
judgement is true in virtue of successfully identifying and
characterising. Thus the something which our judgements about
the past, when they are true, succeed in identifying and
characterising correctly must be the very past events or past states
of certain continuants which they state to have occurred.
So if a judgement about a past event (or past state of a
continuant) is true, that must be because it succeeds in identifying
and correctly describing, or at least appropriately relates us to, such
past event or state. In the simplest case the judgement will ascribe
some property to a past event and, granted it is true, that property
must really inhere in that event. (If it were false, either an event has
5 Thus my argument is not meant to presuppose any one precise philosophical logician's
correspondence theory of truth, only that a truth about a particular matter of fact owes
its truth especially to the possession by something (to which, perhaps unconventionally.
I describe it as corresponding) of a certain character. Controversial as any precise way
of putting this point must be I cannot believe that many will not hold some view
sufficiently similar to provide me with the basis of an argument such as follows.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 9

indeed been identified but it lacks that property, or no event has

been identified at all.)6 It seems evident that that past event can
only have (or lack) that property if it is a reality. In short, no sense
can be made of judgements about the past being true unless we
grant that reality in the largest sense includes the past.

XII

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The use of tenses is very problematic in these discussions. It is
important therefore to emphasise that I am not saying that the
event must still be a reality, in the sense that it must be a reality
existing in the present. For the past event certainly isn't a reality
existing now; it is a reality then. What I do say is that the then, and
its contents (such as this event) must still somehow belong to
reality.
We must stick close to these two points: (1) the past event no
longer exists, that is, it does not belong to now; (2) the past event
belongs in its own time, and is real there.
One might perhaps put the matter thus: it is certainly not true that
the event still exists. It belongs to the past not to the present.
However, it is still true that it did exist. And this can only be
because it is still somehow just as much one of the independent
realities which present thought might be true by somehow
corresponding to (or something of the sort)—even if only by
accident—as are things which are occurring or which exist now.
Suppose that it is a truth about the past that I had a toothache
within a certain stretch of time. As I see it, this means (to put it very
roughly) that thoughts which somehow identify me and that time
remain essentially available (even if only as surmises) and
susceptible of truth by characterising my then state as one of
toothache. But what could make them true if not some kind of
correspondence to the toothache, or its occurrence? Yet that seems
to require that the toothache (and its context) is somehow still a
reality, or somehow included in reality.

6 If the second failure means there is no proper judgement rather than a false one, our
argument is not affected, since it concerns the conditions of a judgement which is true.
10 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

xin
I now ask: how can reality include a past toothache? What kind of
thing is a past toothache? A toothache is an experience of a painful
kind. Some people think that past events continue to be part of
reality, because they somehow take on a kind of quality of pastness.
But I would say that it is of the essence of an experience to be
vividly present as an element in some consciousness, and that an
event which lost this quality of presentness would not be an

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experience. In consequence, it could not be a toothache.
I conclude that the toothache can only be there as a part of reality
if, somehow from its own point of view, or of that of the
consciousness which contains it, it is still there as a present reality.
The reality which makes our judgement true must be throbbingly
present to or in itself and can have no other sort of being. The
reason I don't feel it now is because its locus is in another part of
the universe, which from the point of view of this part of the
universe is called then or past.
The point is that there is no conceivable sort of reality which a
toothache or other experience can possess except that of being
throbbingly or otherwise present for itself. And, since an
experience is—so far as its inherent character goes—just what it
feels itself to be, this presentness is its true character, essential to
what it is so far as it is at all. And something of the same sort would
have to be true also, I suggest, of events which are not experiences,
if there are such; they too can only be, if they are at all, what they
are at their own position in reality, and this must include the kind
of actuality which makes us regard an experience, as we have it, as
present.
I may be told that it is absurd to say that past experiences or other
events are still there in the past, as if this added anything to saying
that they occurred. But this is simply to avoid the issue of the
ontological status of the past. If it is to be the objective correlative
of our judgements, a past event (or state of a continuant) has to be
something. Say by all means that it is sufficient that it was
something. But the problem remains as to what 'was' means. If
there is no sense in which that which was is, then it is sheer nothing,
and cannot provide the role of such an objective correlative. If we
avoid unsatisfactory views, according to which the past has
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 11

become something that it was not when present, and exists now as
some kind of metaphysical shadow of what once was, we must say
that it is in some sense still there in its own time. Doubtless it is
better to say that it is timelessly there in its own time, than to say
that it is so still. But that immediately raises the question what this
timeless form of being is. It can only be, so far as I can see, that of
being an element in reality as a whole conceived as something
simply timelessly there and containing all present and past events,
each fully actual and present in its own being.

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So the view of the past to which these reflections force us is that
all past events are in some timeless sense present events from, so
to speak, their own point of view. In particular every total felt state
is an element in the universe which feels present to itself, but which
is remembered or inferred by later such experiences containing
thoughts which regard it as past. If, as most people think they
believe, there are events which have no feeling of their own
existence, so that they can hardly be said to be present 'from their
own point of view', they must still be regarded as having that
absolute actuality which we normally think distinctive of what is
occurring now, and which is somehow lost when events become
past.7

XIV

Once this is accepted, it is impossible coherently to avoid taking a

similar view of the future.
For in taking this view of the past one is taking it that the series
of one' s experiences up to this moment consists in a series of pulses
or states of experience, each of which is present from its own point
of view and in itself, but past to others. Those experiences I call
past (i.e. the ego of the moment calls past) are, in themselves, and
as they really are, present experiences of their own momentary
egos.
Now from the point of view of what we may call the momentary
ego having those experiences which the ego of this moment calls
past, this ego which is me now, together with its experiences, is

7 Nicholas Nathan has encouraged me to attempt greater clarity here.

 12 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

future. That is, if they have any knowledge of it, it is anticipative

knowledge of it as something to come.
This shows that an experience which is present from its own
point of view (this one) can be future from the point of view of just
such another.
The crucial point is this. This present experience is a future event
from the point of view of events which in themselves are timelessly
or, as we may now put it, eternally8 present and can never really
cease to be present. Moreover, the events the ego of this moment

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calls past, are past only in relation to other events such as this. In
themselves they are eternally present. But granted that this present
experience is a future event from the point of view of other events,
which are as present as it is in their own being, and so is both future
and present, future for other events and present for itself, it seems
an unavoidable conclusion that events which from the point of
view of this present ego are future, are also present realities from
their own point of view. For in this present experience I have as
good an example of a present's future as there can be. Futurity and
pastness must then pertain to events only from the point of view of
other events while every event must be present from its own point
of view, and as it really is. This is true at least of experiences, events
which carry a sense of their own occurrence. For an idealist that
may mean it is true of all real events. But essentially the same point
would apply to unexperienced events, even if its application to
them is less easy to state. For since both idealist and non-idealist
must reach this conclusion about those events which are
experiences the non-idealist will presumably wish to say
something similar about the other events he believes in too.
We are not concerned with the eternal being possessed by
abstractions, but with one which must be possessed by every
concrete event that there has ever been, that of eternally belonging
to a whole which contains all times without itself being in time.
And it is not enough that some kind of metaphysical shadow of it
should exist eternally within that eternal reality, but that each
should in its very presentness be part of what makes up that eternal

8 1 delayed calling the sense in which past events are just there in their own time eternal
until it was shown that the same timeless being pertained to future events also.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 13

being. For if it were only some eternal version of it which existed

there, the question arises: Of what is it a version? If there is nothing
other than the version, then there is no reality of which it is the
version. No, it must be the event itself which belongs to the eternal
being, and thus that eternal reality must be composed of events
which from their own point of view, or as they are in themselves,
are temporal, such as this very sense of trying to get my meaning
across, without getting bogged down in verbal tussles, which I am
'now' feeling.

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XV

For an idealist like myself this conclusion about time implies that
the universe as it really is consists of innumerable moments of
experience, each of which is eternally just there and (to put it in a
way which is apt even if it gives a hostage to opponents by its
offence against ordinary language) cannot really cease to be.
However, each of them—or at any rate the ones we know
about—feels itself as something which is a transition point
between two other experiences. It by no means follows that the
feeling which each experience certainly has of emerging from and
passing into other experiences is entirely an illusion. Personally I
am convinced that there is a sense in which this feeling is quite
correct. For surely it must have a very special relation to what we
call its predecessors and successors, of which this feeling is a sign.
Still, if our conclusions are correct, there is an element of
illusoriness in the feeling of transition, for it goes with a feeling
that somehow past, present and future are radically different sorts
of reality, whereas the truth is that presentness is eternally the true
character of every event, and that each is eternally there in
precisely its own locus in the whole temporal series. I call this view
'eternalism'.
However, although it is natural for me to couple these
conclusions about time with idealism in this way, the same
essential point would apply to events which were quite unfelt. It
can only remain true that they occurred, after they occurred,
because total reality includes them as events with the special sting
of reality we associate with the present. And if this is the truth about
the universe, it justifies us in saying that to some extent time is an
14 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

illusion. Though one could equally say that it points to an

alternative account of time which would show what time really is.

XVI

There is an objection to views of past, present and future akin to

mine which merits consideration.9 It is said that, if each event is
simply eternally there in its own position in time, and its pastness

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is just its being before this utterance, then there is no genuine sense
to such feelings as are expressed in a statement like 'Thank God,
that's over', said when some pain ceases, or of regret for the fact
that something has slipped into the past. For it can hardly mean
'Thank God, that that experience eternally belongs to a time before
this utterance' or 'How sad that those experiences belong to a time
before those utterances'. For those propositions, if true, were
always or equally true (so at least the eternalist will hold). What
one is pleased at, or regrets, is that an experience is in the past, not
that it precedes some other event.
A partial answer is that such utterances express the gladness or
sorrow on the part of the ego of one time that it is not it, but the ego
of another time, to which some experience pertains.10 Just as I can
be pleased or envious at the fact that it is you, not I, who is having
a certain experience, so the I of one time can be pleased or envious
of the I of another time because it is it rather than itself to which a
certain experience pertains. But what of the difference of our
feeling towards the future and the past? Well, first, there is, after
all, a somewhat similar and similarly explicable, feeling of relief
when we find that some unpleasantness we were expecting to have
at this present time has been postponed, even if it is still certain to
occur. And secondly, each state of consciousness is a main causal
factor in producing what will follow and this necessarily brings
with it feelings we have neither to others nor our own past.

9 See 'Thank Goodness That's Over' by A.N. Prior, Philosophy, Volume XXXIX, 1959 at
p. 17.
10 Mellor's reply that the relief is simply caused by the ending of the pain hardly does
justice to their intentional connection. See D.H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 50.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 15

XVII

In any case I have no wish to square the deliverances of the

distinctive feelings we have to the past and future with the
demonstrable unreality of time as ordinarily conceived, nor to
show that an analysis (or account of the truth conditions) of tensed
statements by reference to their B -series relation to their subject
matter can do justice to them. For I have offered no analysis of the
ordinary meanings (or linguistic functioning) of 'past' and 'future',

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but an account of the real status of the realities to which these
predicates are applied (directly or by the use of tenses). These
predicates do not merely indicate their temporal relations to other
events, but ascribe a certain status to them, a status however which
breaks down into incoherence when we try to think it out.
What then mainly constitutes the properties of pastness,
presentness and futurity as we conceive them? Basically, I suggest,
certain emotional feelings which a state of consciousness projects,
as supposed objective characters, onto what sub specie aeternitatis
it is most intimately moulded by or moulds; such feelings, that is,
as regret, nostalgia, relief, hope and fear; I can attempt no thorough
phenomenology of the matter here.11 The different status these
feelings seem to give to past, future and present is an illusion, yet
not totally illusory. For the conative aspect of each experience
really is part of what moulds what it conceives as future (and itself
has really been moulded by what it conceives as past) by projecting
feelings themselves essential to such moulding. Thus the
emotional timbres which form the basis of our sense of pastness,
presentness, and future (greatly extended of course by whatever
more impersonal grasp we have of the hanging of events together)
both falsify and do some justice to how things really are.

xvra
Some philosophers who take an essentially eternalist, or at least
tenseless, view of past, present and future deny that it implies that

11 Cf. George Santayana, The Realm of Matter (New York: Scribners, 1930), Chapters IV
and V, and The Realm of Truth (New York: Scribners, 1936), Preface and Chapters IX
and X; also my 'Ideal Immortality', Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 2,
Summer, 1972.
16 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

time is unreal.12 For they hold that the reality of time requires only
that things change, not that events do. Indeed, to ask whether an
event ever genuinely ceases to be is, they say, to ask an absurd
question. It is things, such as plants and trees and planets which do
so. To talk about events in this way is to speak neither truth nor
falsehood but nonsense.13
Such philosophers (I believe) have failed to absorb the full force
of their own position, and the extent to which it challenges what we

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normally believe in when we believe in change. For the truth is, as
others have argued, that for time to be real (whether it is so or not) it
is not enough that things cease to be, in the sense that there is a time
such that they are not present at subsequent times. Rather, it requires
a real passing away and coming to be of events or states of things. And
it is this which the eternalism for which I have been arguing denies.

XIX

Near the beginning I provisionally identified the notion of reality

with that of determinateness. But that requires some correction now.
The plain man probably combines the standard view with the belief
that the most vivid sort of actuality pertains to the present alone, even
though the past is equally determinate. And there may be
determinationists who think the future as determinate as both but
agree that only the present has such actuality. In arguing that (so
called) past events can only be determinate by being eternally
present in their own being and that consequently the same is true of
(so called) future events I have rejected both views and moved to
determinationism via an eternalism which I derive from the
determinacy of the past. Eternalism is, for me, the ground for
accepting determinationism but it makes a stronger claim (though

12 Among philosophers who take an essentially eternalist view of time are Ayer, Quine,
Mellor, Keith Seddon. I take it that none of these wish to associate their view with the
assertion that time is unreal. See, for example, Mellor, op. cit., pp. 5 and 92. They think
the A series view of time a mistake about what we mean, not a mistake in what we mean.
13 This is roughly the argument of J.J.C. Smart in 'The Stream of Time' in Anthony Flew
(ed.). Essays in Conceptual Analysis (London: Macmillan and Co., 1960), though he
associates it with a rather special treatment of the notion of an event. Similarly Mellor
op. cit. p. 103 and Keith Seddon: Time (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm ) pp. 47-8.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 17

determinationism without it would be as incoherent as the standard

view is).

XX

If, as many are, one is anxious to reject eternalism, but sees how
the standard view leads to it, one may be tempted to return to the
philosophy of the present (or predictionism) however strange its
implications. However, I suggest the view is not merely incredible

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but, fully stated, incoherent. For what it really says is that past
events, conceived as something other than their traces, are nothing
at all. They only exist as the creation of our present memories or of
our present beliefs on the basis of so-called present evidence, or
(for predictionism) of memories or beliefs which may occur in the
future. There is nothing in the real world which these memories or
beliefs report either truly or falsely beyond their own content and
the presently existing, or in the future discoverable, states of affairs
said to provide their evidence. For the past has passed out of
existence.
But such a view cannot be stated without a reference to these
past events which have passed out of existence. And to be thus
referred to they must be something (or at least be values of our
variables—this is not like Meinong on the non-existent). But that
granted, we may now ask to what one is referring when one says
that there were such events. If they are to be objects of reference in
even this minimal way as otherwise uncharacterised past events
which have passed out of being, it can't even be true that they have
become nothing. For if they are nothing, then the expression 'the
past' has no reference. There would be no truth even of the general
sort: 'There were events prior to this present time'. However, once
granted that the past events which there were, and to which we can
still refer, in order to say that there is no definite truth about them,
are not mere nothing, reasons such as we have given against the
standard view must eventually lead us to admit that the only actual
something they can be is events which are eternally present in their
own time, however much they are nothing from our point of view.
The only alternative is to deny that there were such past events at
all, in any way distinct from their traces. But this is hardly a serious
18 T.L.S. SPRIGGE

philosophical position, since it would have to be advanced as a

fresh and different claim each time it was propounded.

XXI

But perhaps we have been too facile in our insistence that there is
no satisfactory conception of a status which past events can have
as objects of reference (or values of variables) other than that
ascribed to them by the eternalist theory.

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One suggestion is that when an event ceases to be present a kind
of shadowy version of it is still left. The simplest version of this
view holds that it is stored in a cosmic or divine memory, which,
ever afterwards, recalls just what happened.14
However, any attempt to make the past real as something
remembered by God, founders on the fact that a later memory,
however concrete and full, and even infallible, is only worth
anything, if it corresponds to the original event—otherwise it's not
a memory. The omniscience of God may be a necessary fact but if
it is to be a fact at all his beliefs must be true by correctly
characterising what they are about. So his memory can only be the
metaphysical guarantee that there is a definite truth about the past
if it is a correct memory of what actually happened. Unless there is
a real past such as he remembers, there is nothing here that he
knows. For if the memory corresponds to the event (or whatever),
it can't be the event. And the event must have some kind of reality
in itself. And once we ask what this kind of reality is, we must
answer that it can only be that of being eternally there as a present
event from its own point of view.
And the same applies to any other view which tries to make the
past survive in some kind of shadowy version of itself, as for
instance it seems to do on a theory of absolute becoming like that
of C. D. Broad. For the metaphysical shadow it leaves is only
worth anything, so far as sustaining an objective truth about the
past goes, if it corresponds to the past as it was when it was a
living actuality. And that requires the reality of both terms of the

14 This is the view of Charles Hartshorne, which 1 criticise in a contribution to the

forthcoming volume on his work in The Library of Living Philosophers. Michael
Dummett may sympathize with such a view. See op. cil. p. xxxix.
 THE UNREALITY OF TIME 19

correspondence relation, not just one. And the reality of the past as
it was when living can only be made sense of if it belongs to total
or eternal reality as something which is, in itself, a living present.
Perhaps it will be said that events don't just leave shadows of
themselves, but somehow themselves fade, or acquire a certain
quality called pastness in a more and more extreme form. But then
we may ask: If the events can fade in this way, why should they not
change in other ways, so that, for instance, an event which was once
a present pleasure becomes a past pain? This may sound absurd—but

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once one allows that the sense in which they remain parts of reality
forever is compatible with their changing in one way, it is hard to see
how one can be confident that they may not change in other ways too.
The real trouble, indeed, lies in the very conception of 'a past
event'. To think of an event as a reality is to think of it as present.
Presentness is, in truth, one and the same as being real, and one can
only think that past events are real by taking the eternalist view that
they are eternally there as present in themselves, while past and
future in relation to other events. Pastness and futurity, we might
say, only exist in the eye of a beholder but presentness is the form
of beholding itself.
Paradoxically, the more real you make the past, the more you make
time unreal. For the past can only be real if its apparent difference in
nature from the present is an illusion and consequently the future's
too. Yet it must be real if there is to be a truth about it. And our ordinary
conception of time requires both those differences and that truth.
Time, in the ordinary sense, then, is unreal, the object of an
incoherent conception. Every event or state of a continuant is
eternally present, and only seems past and future from perspectives
which distort its nature by bathing it in such feelings as nostalgia
or hope. Its real character is that of being eternally present,
however much it seems to itself to be passing away. We can be right
in a sense about the temporal order of events but that order is not
really temporal.

Department of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
David Hume Tower
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9JX
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