34: Major Price’s Extracts from the Mualiat-i-Dara Shekohi. 
where ; and whom, as the giver of sense, we are permitted to call Omni- 
scient and All-seeing ; his is the eternal power of decree—it is ours to submit 
and obey; and to the messenger of truth, the prince of all prophets, 
Mahommed the prophet of God, be endless gratulation ; to him that is guide 
and instructor in all that is virtuous in understanding, and in language 
true. 
First we shall speak of time, as the obstetric medium through which the 
varieties of vegetable and animal creation throughout the universe are 
ushered into life, and made to appear under particular forms; such formsbeing 
prior to element which belongs to nature. The principle of production is 
endowed with life, but the element is perishable. Time, again, is included 
in duration. Every thing allowed to arrive at perfection, whether in man or 
other than man, is finally also destined to perish, through the same means 
and gradation by which it was produced: for thus, in the sacred volume, 
has Omnipotence pronounced, “ after decay comes reproduction, and after 
reproduction decay.” 
Of every person endowed with intelligence, it is the duty to search into 
the nature of his existence, whence he came and whither he shall go, with 
a prudent foresight to reflect that here he is engaged on a toilsome journey, 
in which there is neither delay nor standfast ; for while in this world he is 
under the influence of a two-fold action—that of increase and diminution, 
from which there is no exemption. 
But there can be no action or motion unconnected with time, and time is 
a thing which moves in two separate sections, that which is past and that 
which is not yet come; and between these two there is an interval which is 
incapable of division—like the line between the sun and the shade, which 
belongs neither to sun nor shade. This interval between the divisions of 
time is known in Persian and Arabic by two different names bearing the same 
signification: now—which has neither distance nor extension, belonging 
neither to time past nor that which is to come. Such denomination of 
interval which we have called now, becomes, however, necessary to mark 
the progress of bodies in motion. Andit is by the same interval that things 
in motion are to be discriminated in the revolutions of time. The subject 
will be further spoken upon in its proper place in the course of this 
work, 
Through life, therefore, man will find himself placed in this interval 
