Perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all

We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, not the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full – for it lives only on sufferance of the past and the future) depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past and the actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and the future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 216