Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day

by G. J. Whitrow

  This description of the way in which children learn to develop their

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  sense of time applies only to those growing up in Western industrial civilization and not to children in less sophisticated societies. For example, P. M. Bell has reported that when teaching children in Uganda he found that, although they were not unintelligent, they had much greater difficulty than Western children of similar age in judging how long something took to happen, a two-hour journey by bus being said by some to have taken only ten minutes and by others six hours!5 Also, Australian aborigine children of similar mental capacity to white children find it extremely difficult to tell the time by the clock--something that most Western children usually have learned to do successfully by the age of about 6 or 7. The aborigine children can read the hands of the clock as a memory exercise, but they find it difficult to relate the time they read on the clock to the actual time of day. The explanation that has been suggested is that their lives, unlike ours, are not dominated by time.6

  Time and mankind

  Our sense of time involves some awareness of duration and also of the differences between past, present, and future. There is evidence that our sense of these distinctions is one of the most important mental faculties distinguishing man from all other living creatures. For we have good reason to believe that all animals except man live in a continual present. The possession by animals of some sense of memory, as shown, for example, by dogs which are inclined to give vent to the wildest joy on seeing their owners after a long separation, does not necessitate any image of the past as such. It is sufficient for the dog to recognize its owner.

  Similarly, there is no firm evidence that animals have any sense of the future. In general any actions of theirs that might be thought to bear on this question seem to be purely instinctive, although this conclusion is not quite so obvious in the case of the higher apes, particularly the chimpanzee. The problem was considered very carefully by Wolfgang Koehler in the course of his famous investigation of the mentality of apes. He studied cases where chimpanzees undertook, with a view to some final goal, preparatory work that lasted a long time and in itself afforded no visible approach to the desired end. In such cases it seemed at first that the animal might have some rudimentary notion of the future. Nevertheless, Koehler came to the conclusion that all such behaviour by the highest apes could be explained, to quote his own words, 'more directly from a consideration of the present only'.7 In particular, after a

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  careful analysis of experiments in which chimpanzees readily responded to the opportunity given them to postpone eating until they had accumulated a large supply of food to eat later in some quiet corner free from disturbance, Koehler could find no reason for interpreting their conduct as evidence for a sense of the future. Instead of the animal being spurred on by some feeling of what it will be like later when eating the food, he believed that the chimpanzee's behaviour was simply a response to its instinctive desire to get as much food as possible now. More recently, in his detailed monograph Animal Thought, Stephen Walker has confirmed Koehler's views and has concluded that it is surprisingly difficult to produce convincing experimental proof that any animal has any memory or foresight at all.8

  Nevertheless, the conclusion that a sense of time is peculiar to mankind needs careful evaluation. For, whereas in the absence of any incontrovertible counter-evidence we have good reason to deny this faculty to animals, it has been claimed that there are human beings who also manage very well without it. The classic example that has often been cited is that of the Hopi of Arizona, whose language was studied in great detail by Benjamin Lee Whorf.9 He concluded that the Hopi language contains no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time or any of its aspects. Instead of the concepts of space and time the Hopi use two other basic states which Whorf denoted by the terms 'objective' and 'subjective', respectively. The objective state comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, with no distinction being made between present and past, although everything that we call future is excluded. The subjective state comprises all that we would regard as mental or spiritual, including everything that for us is future, much of which the Hopi regard as predestined, at least in essence. It also includes an aspect of the present, namely that which is beginning to be revealed or done, for example starting an action such as going to sleep. The objective state includes all intervals and distances and in particular the temporal relations between events that have already happened. The subjective state, on the other hand, comprises nothing corrresponding to the sequences and successions that we find in the objective state. Unlike English, the Hopi language prefers verbs to nouns, but its verbs have no tenses. The Hopi do not need terms that refer to space or time. Terms that for English-speakers refer to these concepts are replaced by expressions concerning extension, operation, and cyclic process if they refer to the objective realm. Terms that refer to the future, the psychic-mental, the mythical, and the conjectural are

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  replaced by expressions of subjectivity. Whorf claims that, as a result, the Hopi language gets along perfectly without tenses for its verbs.

  Whorfs' contention that 'the Hopi language contains no reference to 'time', either explicit or implicit, is, however, too sweeping.10 For there is a temporal distinction between the two basic forms of Hopi thought. Instead of the three temporal states--past, present, and future--the Hopi imagine two states which between them comprise our past, present, and future. In so far as the Hopi recognize implicitly a distinction between past and future, they cannot be said to live only in the present. They have some sense of time, although their fundamental intuition of time is not the same as the one evolved in Europe. Nevertheless, the Hopi have successfully developed an agricultural and ceremonial calendar, based on astronomical lore, that is sufficiently precise for particular festivals seldom to fall more than two days from the norm.11

  Similarly, as has been pointed out by Evans-Pritchard, time has a different significance for the Azande of southern Sudan than it had for him. From their behaviour he concluded that for them present and future overlap, so that a man's future health and happiness depend on future conditions that are regarded as already existing. Consequently, it is believed that the mystical forces which produce these conditions can be tackled here and now. When the oracles indicate that a man will fall ill in the near future his state is already bad, his future being already a part of present time. Although the Azande cannot explain these matters, they are content to believe them and act upon them.12

  Another Sudanese race studied by Evans-Pritchard, the Nuer, who live on both banks of the White Nile, have no equivalent of our word 'time' and cannot speak of it as if it were something that passes and can be saved or wasted. Their points of reference in time are provided by their social activities. 'Events [for them] follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to correspond with precision.'13 The Nuer have no units of time such as hours or minutes, for they do not measure time but think only in terms of successions of activities. So many of these involve their cattle that Evans-Pritchard speaks of their 'cattle- clock'. Years are referred to by the floods, pestilences, famines, wars, and so on occurring in them. In due course the names given to the years are forgotten and all events beyond the range of this crude historical record come to be regarded as having occurred long ago. Historical time based on a sequence of events that are of great significance for a whole tribe goes back further than the historical time of smaller groups, but in

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  Evans-Pritchard's opinion it never covers a period of more than about fifty years and the further back from the present the fewer and vaguer are its points of reference.14 Distance between events is not reckoned by the Nuer in terms of temporal concepts but in terms relating to social structure, notably what Evans-Pritchard calls the 'age-set system', all boys 'initiated' during a numb
er of successive years belonging to a single age-set. At the time of Evans-Pritchard's investigation of this system he found members of six sets alive. Although he was unable fully to elucidate the way in which an individual actually perceives time, since the subject 'bristles with difficulties', he concluded that for the Nuer the perception of time is no more than the movement of persons, often as groups, through the social structure. Consequently, it does not yield a true impression of temporal distances between events like that produced by our techniques of dating. In particular, the temporal distance between the beginning of the world and the present day remains fixed. Time- reckoning is essentially a conceptualization of the social structure, the points of reference being a projection into the past of actual relations between social groups. 'It is less a means of co-ordinating events than of co-ordinating relationships, and is therefore mainly a looking- backwards, since relationships must be explained in terms of the past.'15

  These and other examples reveal that just as our intuition of space is not unique, for we now know that there is no unique geometry that we must necessarily apply to space, so there is no unique intuition of time that is common to all mankind. Not only primitive people but relatively advanced civilizations too have assigned different degrees of significance to the temporal mode of existence and to the importance or otherwise of temporal perspective. In short, time in all its aspects has been regarded in many conceptually distinct ways.

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  2. Describing Time Time, language, and number

  Despite its corroboration of the view that ours is not the only way of regarding time, Whorf's study of the Hopi provides powerful evidence of a universal connection between time and language. Similarly, despite the great diversity of existing languages and dialect, the capacity for language appears to be identical in all races. Consequently, we can conclude that man's linguistic ability existed before racial diversification occurred.

  In a famous paper on 'The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour', delivered at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior in 1948, the American physiological psychologist K. S. Lashley argued that the organizing principle underlying the problems of syntax in speech and language is essentially rhythmic in nature, a view which is now generally accepted. Lashley's pioneer investigation of the temporal aspects of language has been developed further by the American physiologist E. H. Lenneberg, notably in his seminal book Biological Foundations of Language, published in 1968. Lenneberg has pointed out that many physiological processes which might be thought to have no temporal aspect do, in fact, exhibit one: for example, in the process of seeing, which appears to be instantaneous, time plays a role, for the identification of even the simplest shapes requires temporal integration in the nervous system. Like Lashley, he believes that the foundations of linguistics are to be found in our anatomy and physiology. In his words, 'Language is best regarded as a peculiar adaptation of a very universal physiological process to a species-specific ethological function: communication among members of our species.'1 Lenneberg came to the conclusion that human articulation involves a basic periodicity of about six cycles a second (with a possible variation of up to a cycle from one individual to another), and he showed that a great variety of phenomena could be explained by this hypothesis.

  In his Clayton Memorial Lecture on 'Some Aspects of Speech', which he delivered to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in

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  1959, C. M. Bowra pointed out that the vocabularies of most primitive peoples are much more extensive than those used by modern sophisticated Europeans and that the reason for this is that, although they have no words for abstract concepts, they tend to be extremely subtle in their detection of fine distinctions in the visible world, which they denote by separate words. Their highly complex languages suit them very well so long as they are not obliged to come to terms with novel and unprecedented conditions. Since the state of equilibrium between survival and starvation which they normally experience is often finely balanced, it is not surprising that they usually consider it dangerous to deviate from their traditional customs and habits. Because they tend to adapt their lives and way of thinking to circumstances which they believe to be immutable, their rules and customs inevitably become rigid. Consequently, their languages, which are intimately adjusted to their way of life, tend to prevent the free movement of their minds into new regions of experience. As Bowra points out:

  In so far as these languages change, and they certainly do, it is towards an ever greater elaboration in their own special methods of dealing with individual impressions and with the finer shades of difference in social relations. It is not surprising that men who spoke them were quite unable to understand what was happening when white men shot them for breaking rules which were to them totally unintelligible.2

  It is now generally recognized that language is man's most outstanding characteristic. The possibility of human language seems to have depended not only on the potentialities of the vocal tract in man but also on the development of Broca's area in the neo-cortex. This area is thought to be concerned with the regulation of sequences of sounds. If this is so, the apparent lack of such an area in the brain of other primates may explain why the calls of these animals are not formed by varying the order in time of elementary units.3

  Children are born with a general facility for language in so far as they exhibit an irresistible drive to express themselves. The babbling of infants is a spontaneous reflex activity, broadly similar to the uncoordinated movements of their limbs. It is an obvious, but none the less remarkable, fact that every normal child has the inherent ability to produce all the sounds of every language in the world, of which there are several thousands. Nevertheless, it is only the child's 'mother tongue' which he learns to speak spontaneously, and he must begin to do this

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  before the age of about 6, as has been shown by the failure to learn to speak of the so-called 'wolf children' who have been unable to make contact with other human beings before that age. Every other language that one tries to learn later requires a special effort. Nevertheless language-learning comes easily only to some. The maximum number of languages that any one man is definitely known to have acquired is just under sixty. The famous orientalist Sir William Jones ( 1746-94) is said to have known over forty.

  The reason why speech is based on sound, rather than gesture, is probably because sound is the sense most closely related to time. Nevertheless, although sound is transitory, the development of language originally depended on man's recognition of long-enduring objects to which names could be given, for there is good reason to believe that the introduction of verb-tenses was a comparatively late development. Our knowledge of the evolution of language is necessarily confined to written records, but they support this conclusion. For example, in Middle Egyptian of about 2000 BC, the 'tenses' were concerned with the repetition of the notion expressed by the verb rather than with the temporal relation of the action concerned to the time associated with the speaker. This was not just a peculiarity of Middle Egyptian, for we find that in other ancient forms of language the dominant temporal characteristic was duration rather than tense. Indeed, it is only in Indo- European languages that distinctions between past, present, and future have been fully developed. In Hebrew, for example, the verb treats action not in this way but as either incomplete or perfected. Moreover, 'the future is preponderantly thought to lie before us, while in Hebrew future events are always expressed as coming after US.'4 On the other hand, already in archaic Greek we find evidence of verbal forms that discriminated between the tenses.

  'Old English', the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest, contained no distinct words for the future tense. Instead, the present tense was specially adapted for that purpose as and when necessary.

  Suzanne Fleischman has drawn attention to the fact that the tenses we now use correspond to distinct mental activities: the past to knowledge; the present to feeling; and the future to desire an
d obligation, as well as potentiality. Owing to the stress laid by Christianity on moral obligation, it has been claimed that the rise of that religion was the sole reason that new modal futures were introduced about the fifth century AD, but in her opinion no less importance should be assigned to the effect