We, human beings and human societies, are processes of becoming. We are what we have been and what we will be. What we have been, what we call our past, exists nowhere else than as an idea in our minds. What we will be, what we call our future, exists nowhere else than as an idea in our minds. What we call the present is the vanishing-point between the past and the future, a mere idea within our minds of the relationship between what we have been and what we will be. In the continuous present of our idea of our becoming, we present the past and the future to ourselves as a contrast between an actuality and a potentiality.