Accordingly we must admit that though we can imagine that mind in the operation of sense-awareness might be free from any character of passage, yet in point of fact our experience of sense-awareness exhibits our minds as partaking in this character.
On the other hand the mere fact of memory is an escape from transience.
In memory the past is present.

It is not present as overleaping the temporal succession of nature, but it is present as an immediate fact for the mind.

Accordingly memory is a disengagement of the mind from the mere passage of nature; for what has passed for nature has not passed for mind.
Furthermore the distinction between memory and the immediate present is not so clear as it is conventional to suppose.

There is an intellectual theory of time as a moving knife-edge, exhibiting a present fact without temporal extension.

This theory arises from the concept of an ideal exactitude of observation.