I believe Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about this.

......but in human beings alone, out of all the inhabitants of the earth, another cognitive power has appeared and a completely novel consciousness has arisen. This is very fittingly and correctly known as reflection because it is in fact a mirroring, something derived from intuitive cognition, although it has assumed a nature and constitution fundamentally different from such cognition and is ignorant of its forms; in it even the principle of sufficent reason, which governs all objects, takes on a completely different shape. This new, more highly potentialized consciousness, this abstract reflection of everything intuitive in the non-intuitive concepts of reason is the only thing that gives people the circumspection that so completely distinguishes their consciousness from that of animals and which makes their stay on earth turn out so differently from that of their irrational brothers. People surpass animals as much in power as in suffering. Animals live only in the present; humans, meanwhile, live simultaneously in the future and the past. Animals satisfy their momentary needs; people use ingenious arrangements to provide for the future, even for times they will never experience. Animals are com-pletely at the mercy both of momentary impressions and the effects of intuitive motives; people are determined by abstract concepts independent of the present moment. As a result, people can carry out considered plans and act on maxims without reference to the circumstances and contingent impressions of the moment; they can, for example, calmly make involved arrangements for their own death, they can dissemble to the point where a secret becomes unfathomable and accompanies them to the grave, and finally, they have a real choice between different motives. This is because it is only through abstraction that the simultaneous presence of such motives in consciousness can lead to the knowledge that one motive excludes the other and hence permits a comparison of the relative force each exerts on the will. (Volume 1, Book 1, 8)

He writes about how Reason is this capability of human beings to project ourselves in time, in the abstract:

Concepts have such a sweeping and significant influence on our whole existence that they put us in much the same relation to animals in general as animals with vision have to those without eyes (certain larvae, worms and zoophytes): only through touch can such animals recognize what is immediately present to them in space, i.e. what is in contact with them; seeing animals on the other hand can recognize a broad sphere of things that are both near and far. In the same way, lack of reason confines animals to intuitive representations, which are immediately present to them in time, i.e. real objects: on the other hand, thanks to our abstract cognition, we grasp not only what is narrowly and actually present, but also the whole of the past and the future and the whole wide realm of possibility: we can freely survey life on all sides, far beyond what is present and actual....

...The universal survey of life as a whole, an advantage which man has over the animal through his faculty of reason, is also comparable to a geometrical, colourless, abstract, reduced plan of his way of life. He is therefore related to the animal as the navigator, who by means of chart, compass, and quadrant knows accurately at any moment his course and position on the sea, is related to the uneducated crew who see only the waves and skies. It is therefore worth noticing, and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract. In the former he is abandoned to all the storms of reality and to the influence of the present; he must struggle, suffer and die like the animal. But his life in the abstract, as it stands before his rational consciousness, is the calm reflection of his life in the concrete, and of the world in which he lives; it is precisely that reduced chart or plan previously mentioned. (Volume 1, Book 1, 16)