Note 66 — Chapter I · SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY IN GREECE, BEFORE AND IN THE TIME OF SOKRATES.

“To make parts, — or to part or divide, Space or Time, — is nothing else but to consider one and another within the same: so that if any man divide space or time, the diverse conceptions he has are more, by one, than the parts which he makes. For his first conception is of that which is to be divided — then, of some part of it — and again of some other part of it: and so forwards, as long as he goes in dividing. But it is to be noted, that here, by division, I do not mean the severing or pulling asunder of one space or time from another (for does any man think that one hemisphere may be separated from the other hemisphere, or the first hour from the second?), but diversity of consideration: so that division is not made by the operation of the hands, but of the mind.” — Hobbes, First Grounds of Philosophy, chap. vii. 5, vol. i. p. 96, ed. Molesworth.

“Expansion and duration have this farther agreement, that though they are both considered by us as having parts, yet their parts are not separable one from another, not even in thought; though the parts of bodies from which we take our measure of the one — and the parts of motion, from which we may take the measure of the other — may be interrupted or separated.” — Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, book ii. ch. 15. s. 11.

In the Platonic Parmenides, p. 156 D., we find the remarkable conception of what he calls τὸ ἐξαίφνης, ἄτοπός τις φύσις — a break in the continuity of duration, an extra-temporal moment.