Time is known to me as an abstraction from the passage of events.

The fundamental fact which renders this abstraction possible is the passing of nature, its development, its creative advance, and combined with this fact is another characteristic of nature, namely the extensive relation between events.

These two facts, namely the passage of events and the extension of events over each other, are in my opinion the qualities from which time and space originate as abstractions.

But this is anticipating my own later speculations.
Meanwhile, returning to the absolute theory, we are to suppose that time is known to us independently of any events in time.

What happens in time occupies time.