Time and Eternity (philosophy book)

Time and Eternity - An Essay on the Philosophy of Religion (1st imp. Princeton New Jersey 1952, Princeton University Press, 169 pp) is a philosophy book written by Walter Terence Stace. At the time of writing, Stace was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, where he had worked since 1932 after a 22-year career in the Ceylon Civil Service. Time and Eternity was one of his first books about the philosophy of religion and mysticism, after writing throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s that was influenced by phenomenalist philosophy.

In his introduction Stace writes that Time and Eternity is an attempt to set out the fundamental nature of religion, and to deal with the conflict between religion and naturalism. He explains that the basic idea set out in the book is that all religious thought is symbolic, and that his influences include Rudolf Otto, especially his Mysticism East and West, and Immanuel Kant. He says he was motivated to write the book in an attempt to add to the "other half of the truth which I now think naturalism [as espoused in his 1947 essay Man Against Darkness] misses".

The book begins by looking at religion, specifically God as non-being and as being, put by Stace as the negative and positive divine. Stace then defines two orders of being - time and eternity, which he says intersect in the moment of mystic illumination. He goes on to say that the nature of God or eternity is such that all religious language is symbolic and that it is necessarily subject to contradictions.