Time and Progress—Time as Progress: An Enlightened Sermon by William Robertson

In the introductory studies of his seminal Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck offers an engaging and succinct illustration of the course of what he calls the “temporalization of history” in European thought during the early-modern period. Koselleck conceives the process as a whole in terms of the changes in the perception of the “compression” (or “acceleration”) of time that, supposedly, precedes the onset of the future in the thought of these past generations: “For Luther, the compression of time is a visible sign that, according to God’s will, the Final Judgment is imminent, that the world is about to end. For.