Time, according to St. Augustine is an elusive concept, if you try to grasp it, it eludes your grasp. What is time? ”if nobody asks me” says St. Augustine, “I know it. But if I wish to explain to him who asks, I no longer know it”. Although we talk of the past, present and future, neither the past nor the future really exists, for the past is gone and the future is not yet. But even the present itself is only a passing moment. What therefore do we mean by time? What do we mean by the past, the present and future? What we call the past is nothing other than the human mind as it remembers. The future is existence outside the mind which expects. And the present is the human mind as it considers, it is reference point for both the past and the future. For it is the human mind which is the present passing moment remembers and expects, thereby constitute the past and the future. In short, time is a mental phenomenon; it exists only in the mind.
According to Bergson in the voyage of discovery: - Time seems to be the bridge that overcomes the dichotomy between the internal mind and the external world. In one sense time is out there in the world characterizing the existence of external objects but it is also something we experience informally as characterizing our subjective experience.
Bergson distinguishes two approaches to time: Scientific time (also called ”Clock time”) and what he called duration (or ”Real time”). The first is time as an intellectual, scientific concept, and the second is time as we experience it and live it.
The abstract time of the science is thought of in spatial terms; as though it were an unbounded straight line whose points are temporal moments. When we try to appropriate time in language, we talk about ”a point in time” ”a length of time,” ”Short time.” A future event is spoken of as something that will happen “further on down the time”. In contrast, duration is lived time; it is known through intuition as an immediate datum of consciousness. Duration is not a succession of discreet moments but a flowing indivisible continuum.
