10. (11). To accomplish this we shall have to return to the nature
which, as we pointed out above, was essential to eternity; that
immutable life, wholly realized all at once, infinite and perfect,
subsisting in, and referring to unity. Time was not yet, or at least,
it did not yet exist for the intelligible entities. Only, it was yet
to be born of them,[458] because (as was the world), time, by both its
reason and nature, was posterior to the (intelligible entities[459]).
Are we trying to understand how time issued from among intelligible
entities while these were resting within themselves? Here it would be
useless to call upon the Muses, for they did not yet exist. Still this
might perhaps not be useless; for (in a certain sense, that time had
already begun, then, so far as they existed within the sense-world)
they existed already. In any case, the birth of time will be plain
enough if we consider it only as it is born and manifested. Thus much
can be said about it.