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The phrases in their context!

Extract from A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE:

There is another phaenomenon of a like nature with the foregoing, viz, the superior effects of the same distance in futurity above that in the past.
This difference with respect to the will is easily accounted for.
As none of our actions can alter the past, it is not strange it should never determine the will.
But with respect to the passions the question is yet entire, and well worth the examining.
Besides the propensity to a gradual progression through the points of space and time, we have another peculiarity in our method of thinking, which concurs in producing this phaenomenon.
We always follow the succession of time in placing our ideas, and from the consideration of any object pass more easily to that, which follows immediately after it, than to that which went before it.
We may learn this, among other instances, from the order, which is always observed in historical narrations.
Nothing but an absolute necessity can oblige an historian to break the order of time, and in his narration give the precedence to an event, which was in reality posterior to another.
This will easily be applied to the question in hand, if we reflect on what I have before observed, that the present situation of the person is always that of the imagination, and that it is from thence we proceed to the conception of any distant object.
When the object is past, the progression of the thought in passing to it from the present is contrary to nature, as proceeding from one point of time to that which is preceding, and from that to another preceding, in opposition to the natural course of the succession.
On the other hand, when we turn our thought to a future object, our fancy flows along the stream of time, and arrives at the object by an order, which seems most natural, passing always from one point of time to that which is immediately posterior to it.
This easy progression of ideas favours the imagination, and makes it conceive its object in a stronger and fuller light, than when we are continually opposed in our passage, and are obliged to overcome the difficulties arising from the natural propensity of the fancy.
A small degree of distance in the past has, therefore, a greater effect, in interupting and weakening the conception, than a much greater in the future.
From this effect of it on the imagination is derived its influence on the will and passions.
There is another cause, which both contributes to the same effect, and proceeds from the same quality of the fancy, by which we are determined to trace the succession of time by a similar succession of ideas.
When from the present instant we consider two points of time equally distant in the future and in the past, it is evident, that, abstractedly considered, their relation to the present is almost equal.
For as the future will sometime be present, so the past was once present.
If we coued, therefore, remove this quality of the imagination, an equal distance in the past and in the future, would have a similar influence.
Nor is this only true, when the fancy remains fixed, and from the present instant surveys the future and the past; but also when it changes its situation, and places us in different periods of time.
For as on the one hand, in supposing ourselves existent in a point of time interposed betwixt the present instant and the future object, we find the future object approach to us, and the past retire, and become more distant: so on the other hand, in supposing ourselves existent in a point of time interposed betwixt the present and the past, the past approaches to us, and the future becomes more distant.
But from the property of the fancy above-mentioned we rather chuse to fix our thought on the point of time interposed betwixt the present and the future, than on that betwixt the present and the past.