It is evidently something so fundamental in experience that we can hardly stand back from it and hold it apart so as to view it in its own proportions.
We have first to make up our minds whether time is to be found in nature or nature is to be found in time.

The difficulty of the latter alternative--namely of making time prior to nature--is that time then becomes a metaphysical enigma.

What sort of entities are its instants or its periods?
The dissociation of time from events discloses to our immediate inspection that the attempt to set up time as an independent terminus for knowledge is like the effort to find substance in a shadow.
There is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing.
It is necessary however to make a distinction.

In some sense time extends beyond nature.

It is not true that a timeless sense-awareness and a timeless thought combine to contemplate a timeful nature.
Sense-awareness and thought are themselves processes as well as their termini in nature.