Even below the level of intellect one will have to recognize the same form at work both in procreation and in growth: that life at any given moment transcends itself, that its present forms a unity with the "not-yet" of the future. As long as one separates past, present, and future with analytical sharpness, time is unreal, because by this separation only the temporal unextended, that is, the atemporal moment of the present tense, is real. Life, however, is the unique mode of existence for whose reality this distinction does not hold. … For life alone is time real. … Time is the—perhaps abstract—form in our consciousness of life itself, as experienced in unformulable, immediate concreteness.

DEFINE: Defines time as the form of life's consciousness, not an abstract container separate from life.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 809