Evidently this serial time is the result of an intellectual process of abstraction.

What I have done is to give precise definitions of the procedure by which the abstraction is effected.

This procedure is merely a particular case of the general method which in my book I name the 'method of extensive abstraction.' This serial time is evidently not the very passage of nature itself.

It exhibits some of the natural properties which flow from it.

The state of nature 'at a moment' has evidently lost this ultimate quality of passage.