This easy progression of ideas favours the imagination, and makes it conceive its object in a stronger and fuller light, than when we are continually opposed in our passage, and are obliged to overcome the difficulties arising from the natural propensity of the fancy.

A small degree of distance in the past has, therefore, a greater effect, in interupting and weakening the conception, than a much greater in the future.

From this effect of it on the imagination is derived its influence on the will and passions.
There is another cause, which both contributes to the same effect, and proceeds from the same quality of the fancy, by which we are determined to trace the succession of time by a similar succession of ideas.

When from the present instant we consider two points of time equally distant in the future and in the past, it is evident, that, abstractedly considered, their relation to the present is almost equal.

For as the future will sometime be present, so the past was once present.