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Full Idea
To ask why God did not make everything a year sooner would be reasonable if time were something apart from temporal things, but time is just the succession of things, which remains the same if the universe is created a year sooner.
Gist of Idea
If everything in the universe happened a year earlier, there would be no discernible difference
Source
Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Samuel Clarke [1716], 3.6)
Book Ref
Leibniz,Gottfried: 'Philosophical Writings', ed/tr. Parkinson,G.H.R. [Dent 1973], p.212
| 314 | Heavenly movements gave us the idea of time, and caused us to inquire about the heavens [Plato] |
| 5103 | Time is not change, but requires change in our minds to be noticed [Aristotle] |
| 5698 | We can only sense time by means of movement, or its absence [Lucretius] |
| 5978 | I know what time is, until someone asks me to explain it [Augustine] |
| 2101 | If everything in the universe happened a year earlier, there would be no discernible difference [Leibniz] |
| 5535 | That times cannot be simultaneous is synthetic, so it is known by intuition, not analysis [Kant] |
| 5560 | The three modes of time are persistence, succession and simultaneity [Kant] |
| 8591 | There could be no time if nothing changed [McTaggart] |
| 21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
| 22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
| 23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |