Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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If the number of dawns, suns, autumns, or snows that has passed since a certain event took place, or will elapse before a certain event is to take place, be indicated, the time that has passed or is to pass will be defined, because the dawn or the sun recurs once in the day, and an autumn or a snow, i. e. winter, once in the year. This is the oldest mode of counting time. It is not the units as a whole that are counted, since the unit as such had not yet been conceived, but a concrete phenomenon recurring only once within this unit. It is the pars pro toto method so extensively used in chronology, and by this name we shall call it[1].

Since it must now be regarded as the natural course of development that the systematic has gradually arisen out of the unsystematic, and that the indication of concrete phenomena following one another in the regular succession of Nature has preceded the abstract numerical indication of time offered by our calendars, the origin of the time-reckoning must be sought not in any one system, however simple, but in the discontinuous or pars pro toto time-indications which are related to concrete phenomena.