6. (7). Speaking thus of eternity, it is not anything foreign to us,
and we do not need to consult the testimony of anybody but ourselves.
For indeed, how could we understand anything that we could not
perceive? How could we perceive something that would be foreign to us?
We ourselves, therefore, must participate in eternity. But how can we
do so, since we are in time? To understand how one can simultaneously
be in time and in eternity, it will be necessary to study time. We
must therefore descend from eternity to study time. To find eternity,
we have been obliged to rise to the intelligible world; now we are
obliged to descend therefrom to treat of time; not indeed descending
therefrom entirely, but only so far as time itself descended therefrom.