 a principle that relativises cognition to different types of cognizer. On its basis, he can say that many future events (such as those that depend on the exercise of my will) are in themselves unfixed and contingent, but they are fixed and necessary as known by God. This divine mode of cognition can to some extent be explained by God’s relation to time. He exists in eternity, not time. According to many interpreters, God is thereby atemporal, but it is more likely that Boethius meant that God has a special relationship to time, by which he intellectually grasps all its fleeting moments at once and so he perceives every moment of time as if it were the present. Just as we can watch a chariot race and know who is in the lead, without thereby constraining the competitors, so God knows all things, past, present and future, as if they were present.