E4D6
Definition — Part IV
Latin
Quid per affectum erga rem futuram, præsentem et præteritam intelligam, explicui in scholiis I et II propositionis 18 partis III, quod vide. Sed venit hic præterea notandum quod ut loci sic etiam temporis distantiam non nisi usque ad certum quendam limitem possumus distincte imaginari hoc est sicut omnia illa objecta quæ ultra ducentos pedes a nobis distant seu quorum distantia a loco in quo sumus, illam superat quam distincte imaginamur, æque longe a nobis distare et perinde ac si in eodem plano essent, imaginari solemus, sic etiam objecta quorum existendi tempus longiore a præsenti intervallo abesse imaginamur quam quod distincte imaginari solemus, omnia æque longe a præsenti distare imaginamur et ad unum quasi temporis momentum referimus.
English (Elwes 1883)
What I mean by emotion felt towards a thing, future, present, and past, I explained in III. xviii., notes. i. and ii., which see.
(But I should here also remark, that we can only distinctly conceive distance of space or time up to a certain definite limit; that is, all objects distant from us more than two hundred feet, or whose distance from the place where we are exceeds that which we can distinctly conceive, seem to be an equal distance from us, and all in the same plane; so also objects, whose time of existing is conceived as removed from the present by a longer interval than we can distinctly conceive, seem to be all equally distant from the present, and are set down, as it were, to the same moment of time.)
Modern English
What I mean by an affect toward a future, present, or past thing I explained in Scholia I and II to Proposition 18 of Part 3 — see those.
But here I must also note that, just as we can distinctly imagine distances of place only up to a certain limit, we can distinctly imagine distances of time only up to a certain limit as well. That is, just as we tend to imagine all objects more than about two hundred feet away — or whose distance from where we stand exceeds what we can distinctly imagine — as equally far from us and as if they lay in the same plane, so too we tend to imagine all objects whose time of existence we conceive as further from the present than we can distinctly imagine as equally distant from the present, and we refer them all to a single moment of time, as it were.