Chapter 29

From sight to touch0.071From touch to sight0.053From sight to hearing0.16From hearing to sight0.06From one ear to another0.064

To be conscious of a time interval at all is one thing; to tell whether it be shorter or longer than another interval is a different thing.A number of experimental data are on hand which give us a measure of the delicacy of this latter perception. The problem is that of thesmallest difference between two timeswhich we can perceive.

The difference is at its minimum when the times themselves are very short. Exner,[527]reacting as rapidly as possible with his foot, upon a signal seen by the eye (spark), noted all the reactions which seemed to him either slow or fast in the making. He thought thus that deviations of about 1/100 of a second either way from the average werecorrectly noticed by him at the time. The average was here 0.1840''. Hall and Jastrow listened to the intervals between the clicks of their apparatus. Between two such equal intervals of 4.27'' each, a middle interval was included, which might be made either shorter or longer than the extremes. "After the series had been heard two or even three times, no impression of the relative length of the middle interval would often exist, and only after hearing the fourth and last [repetition of the series] would the judgment incline to theplusorminusside. Inserting the variable between two invariable and like intervals greatly facilitated judgment, which between two unlike terms is far less accurate."[528]Three observers in these experiments made no error when the middle interval varied 1/60 from the extremes. When it varied 1/120, errors occurred, but were few. This would make the minimumabsolutedifference perceived as large as 0.355''.

This minimum absolute difference, of course, increases as the times compared grow long. Attempts have been made to ascertain whatratioit bears to the times themselves. According to Fechner's 'Psychophysic Law' it ought always to bear the same ratio. Various observers, however, have found this not to be the case.[529]On the contrary, very interestingoscillationsin the accuracy of judgment and in the direction of the error—oscillations dependent upon the absolute amount of the times compared—have been noticed by all who have experimented with the question. Of these a brief account may be given.

In the first place,in every list of intervals experimented with there will be found what Vierordt calls an'indifference-point;' that is to say, an interval which we judge with maximum accuracy, a time which we tend to estimate as neither longer or shorter than it really is, and away from which,in both directions, errors increase their size.[530]This time varies from one observer to another, but its average is remarkably constant, as the following table shows.[531]

The times, noted by the ear, and the average indifference-points (given in seconds) were, for—

Wundt[532]0.72Kollert[533]0.75Estel (probably)0.75Mehner0.71Stevens[534]0.71Mach[535]0.35Buccola (about)[536]0.40

The odd thing about these figures is the recurrence they show in so many men of about three fourths of a second,as the interval of time most easy to catch and reproduce, Odder still, both Estel and Mehner found thatmultiplesof this time were more accurately reproduced than the time-intervals of intermediary length;[537]and Glass found a certain periodicity, with the constant increment of 1.25 sec., in his observations. There would seem thus to exist something like a periodic or rhythmic sharpening of our time-sense, of which the period differs somewhat from one observer to the next.

Our sense of time, like other senses,seems subject to the law of contrast. It appeared pretty plainly in Estel's observations that an interval sounded shorter if a long one had immediately preceded it, and longer when the opposite was the case.

Like other senses, too,our sense of time is sharpened by practice. Mehner ascribes almost all the discrepancies between other observers and himself to this cause alone.[538]

Tracts of time filled(with clicks of sound)seem longer than vacant onesof the same duration, when the latter does not exceed a second or two.[539]This, which reminds one of what happens with spaces seen by the eye, becomes reversed when longer times are taken. It is, perhaps, in accordance with this law that aloudsound, limiting a short interval of time, makes it appear longer, aslightsound shorter. In comparing intervals marked out by sounds, we must take care to keep the sounds uniform.[540]

There is a certain emotionalfeelingaccompanying the intervals of time, as is well known in music.The sense of haste goes with one measure of rapidity, that of delay with another;and these two feelings harmonize with different mental moods. Vierordt listened to series of strokes performed by a metronome at rates varying from 40 to 200 aminute, and found that they very naturally fell into seven categories, from 'very slow' to 'very fast.'[541]Each category of feeling included the intervals following each other within a certain range of speed, and no others. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative judgment—an æsthetic judgment, in fact. The middle category, of speed that was neutral, or, as he calls it, 'adequate,' contained intervals that were grouped about 0.62 second, and Vierordt says that this made what one might almost call anagreeabletime.[542]

The feeling of time and accent in music, of rhythm, is quite independent of that of melody. Tunes with marked rhythm can be readily recognized when simply drummed on the table with the finger-tips.

Although subdividing the time by beats of sensation aids our accurate knowledge of the amount of it that elapses, such subdivision does not seem at the first glance essential to our perception of its flow. Let one sit with closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world, attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one who wakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the middle of the night, and all things moving to a day of doom." There seems under such circumstances as these no variety in the material content of our thought, and what we notice appears, if anything, to be the pure series of durations budding, as it were, and growing beneath our indrawn gaze. Is this really so or not? The question is important, for, if the experience be what it roughly seems, we have a sort of special sense for pure time—a sense to which empty duration is an adequate stimulus; while if it be an illusion, it must be that our perception of time's flight, in the experiences quoted, is due to thefillingof the time, and to ourmemoryof a content which it had a moment previous, and which we feel to agree or disagree with its content now.

It takes but a small exertion of introspection to showthat the latter alternative is the true one, and thatwe can no more intuit a duration than we can intuit an extension, devoid of all sensible content. Just as with closed eyes we perceive a dark visual field in which a curdling play of obscurest luminosity is always going on; so, be we never so abstracted from distinct outward impressions, we are always inwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness. Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat. Now, all these processes are rhythmical, and are apprehended by us, as they occur, in their totality; the breathing and pulses of attention, as coherent successions, each with its rise and fall; the heart-beats similarly, only relatively far more brief; the words not separately, but in connected groups. In short, empty our minds as we may, some form ofchanging processremains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled. And along with the sense of the process and its rhythm goes the sense of the length of time it lasts. Awareness ofchangeis thus the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends; but there exists no reason to suppose that empty time's own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused. The change must be of some concrete sort—an outward or inward sensible series, or a process of attention or volition.[543]

And here again we have an analogy with space. The earliest form of distinct space-perception is undoubtedly that of a movement over some one of our sensitive surfaces, and this movement is originally given as a simple whole of feeling, and is only decomposed into its elements—successive positions successively occupied by the moving body—when our education in discrimination is much advanced.But a movement is a change, a process; so we see that in the time-world and the space-world alike the first known things are not elements, but combinations, not separate units, but wholes already formed. The condition ofbeingof the wholes may be the elements; but the condition of ourknowingthe elements is our having already felt the wholes as wholes.

In the experience of watching empty time flow—'empty' to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth—we tell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud. This composition out of units of duration is called the law of time'sdiscrete flow. The discreteness is, however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts ofrecognitionorapperceptionofwhatit is are discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be. All continuous sensations arenamedin beats. We notice that a certain finite 'more' of them is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson's image, the sensation is the measuring-tape, the perception the dividing-engine which stamps its length. As we listen to a steady sound, wetake it inin discrete pulses of recognition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the same!' The case stands no otherwise with time.

After a small number of beats our impression of the amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic conception.[544]When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as aname, or by running over a few salientdatestherein, with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like aperceptionof the greater length of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth. To an historian,it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so appear a moremultitudinousthing. And for the same reason most people will think they directly perceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that of the past week. But there is properly no comparative timeintuitionin these cases at all. It is but dates and events.representingtime; their abundancesymbolizingits length. I am sure that this is so, even where the times compared are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same with Spaces of many miles, which we always compare with each other by the numbers which measure them.[545]

From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familial variations in our estimation of lengths of time.In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Von Holtei's 'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his native village.

"Seven years," he exclaims, "seven years since I ran away! More like seventy it seems, so much has happened. I cannot think of it all without becoming dizzy—at any rate not now. And yet again, when I look at the village, at the church-tower, it seems as if I could hardly have been seven days away."

Prof. Lazarus[546](from whom I borrow this quotation), thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by our principle of the awakened memories being multitudinous or few:

"The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which he had in view on the day of his leaving the village rises now in his mind as its image lies before him. And with it—in rapid succession and violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections—arise massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They roll and wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year, then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, thefirst, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and he reels with the fulness of his vision.... Then the inner eye turns away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especially to the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. The one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so unchanged, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come between."

The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older—that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same.

"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour."

So writes Prof. Paul Janet,[547]and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life—a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length. This formula roughly expresses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time inretrospect. They shortenin passingwhenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity.Tædium, ennui, Langweile, boredom,are words for which, probably, every language known to man has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and being ready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself.[548]Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems incredible. You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course. All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the timeper se, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision. Theodiousnessof the whole experience comes from its insipidity; forstimulationis the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have.[549]The sensation of tæedium is aprotest, says Volkmann, against the entire present.

Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way. A space we measure by pacing appears longer than one we traverse with no thought of its length. And in general an amount of space attended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spaciousness than one of which we only note the content.[550]

I do not say thateverythingin these fluctuations of estimate can be accounted for by the time's content being crowded and interesting, or simple and tame. Both in the shortening of time by old age and in its lengthening byennuisome deeper causemaybe at work. This cause can only be ascertained, if it exist, by finding outwhy we perceive time at all. To this inquiry let us, though without much hope, proceed.

If asked why we perceive the light of the sun, or the sound of an explosion, we reply, "Because certain outer forces, ether-waves or air-waves, smite upon the brain, awakening therein changes, to which the conscious perceptions, light and sound, respond." But we hasten to add that neither light nor soundcopyormirrorthe ether- or air-waves; they represent them only symbolically. Theonlycase, says Helmholtz, in which such copying occurs, and in which

"our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that of thetune-successionof phenomena. Simultaneity, succession, and the regular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sensations as in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, take place in time, so that the time-relations of the latter can furnish a true copy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows the sensation of the lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air by the electric discharge reaches the observer's place later than that of the luminiferous ether."[551]

One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pursuing such reflections as these, to follow them to a sort of crude speculative conclusion, and to think that he has at last got the mystery of cognition where, to use a vulgar phrase, 'the wool is short.' What more natural, we say, than that the sequences and durations of thingsshouldbecome known? The succession of the outer forces stamps itself as a like succession upon the brain. The brain's successive changes are copied exactly by correspondingly successive pulses of the mental stream. The mental stream, feeling itself, must feel the time-relations of its own states. But as these are copies of the outward time-relations, so must it know them too. That is to say, these latter time-relations arouse their own cognition; or, in other words, the mere existence of time in those changes out of the mind which affect the mind is a sufficient cause why time is perceived by the mind.

This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even though wewereto conceive the outer successions as forces stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's successions as forces stamping their image on the mind,[552]still, between the mind's own changesbeingsuccessive, andknowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world.A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their own succession is added, that must be treated as anadditional fact requiring its own special elucidation,which this talk about outer time-relations stamping copies of themselves within, leaves all untouched.

I have shown, at the outset of the article, that what is past, to be known as past, must be knownwithwhat is present, andduringthe 'present' spot of time. As the clear understanding of this point has some importance, let me, at the risk of repetition, recur to it again. Volkmann has expressed the matter admirably, as follows:

"One might be tempted to answer the question of the origin of the time-idea by simply pointing to the train of ideas, whose various members, starting from the first, successively attain to full clearness. But against this it must be objected that the successive ideas are not yet the idea of succession, because successioninthought is not the thoughtofsuccession. If idea A follows idea B, consciousness simply exchanges one for another. That Bcomes afterA is for our consciousness a non-existent fact; for thisafteris given neither in B nor in A; and no third idea has been supposed. The thinking of the sequence of B upon A is another kind of thinking from that which brought forth A and then brought forth B; and this first kind of thinking is absent so long as merely the thinking of A and the thinking of B are there. In short, when we look at the matter sharply, we come to this antithesis, that ifAand B are to be representedas occurring in successionthey must besimultaneously represented; if we are to thinkofthem as one after the other, we mustthinkthem both at once."[553]

If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by an horizontal line, the thoughtofthe stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point. The length of this perpendicular stands for a certain object or content, which in this case is the time thought of, and all of which is thought of together at the actual moment of the stream upon which the perpendicular is raised. Mr. James Ward puts the matter very well in his masterly article 'Psychology' in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, page 64. He says:

"We may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simultaneity as a second line at right angles to the first; empty time—or time-length without time-breadth, we may say—is a mere abstraction. Now, it is with the former line that we have to do in treating of timeas it is, and with the latter in treating of our intuition of time, where, just as in a perspective representation of distance, we are confined to lines in a plane at right angles to the actual line of depth. In a succession of events, say of sense-impressions, A B C D E..., the presence of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succession involves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two or more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past, present, and future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds to these differences is in consciousness simultaneously."

There is thus a sort ofperspective projectionof past objects upon present consciousness, similar to that of wide landscapes upon a camera-screen.

And since we saw a while ago that our maximum distinctintuitionof duration hardly covers more than a dozen seconds (while our maximum vague intuition is probably not more than that of a minute or so), we must suppose thatthis amount of duration is pictured fairly steadily in each passing instant of consciousnessby virtue of some fairly constant feature in the brain-process to which the consciousness is tied.This feature of the brain-process, whatever it be, must be the cause of our perceiving the fact of time at all.[554]The duration thus steadily perceived is hardly more than the 'specious present,' as it was called a few pages back. Itscontentis in a constant flux, events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one, and each of them changing its time-coefficient from 'not yet,' or 'not quite yet,' to 'just gone' or 'gone,' as it passes by. Meanwhile, the specious present, the intuited duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the waterfall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that stream through it. Each of these, as it slips out, retains the power of being reproduced; and when reproduced, is reproduced with the duration and neighbors which it originally had. Please observe, however, that the reproduction of an event,afterit has once completely dropped out of the rearward end of the specious present, is an entirely different psychic fact from its direct perception in the specious present as a thing immediately past. A creature might be entirely devoid ofreproductivememory, and yet have the time-sense; but thelatter would be limited, in his case, to the few seconds immediately passing by. Time older than that he would never recall. I assume reproduction in the text, because I am speaking of human beings who notoriously possess it. Thus memory gets strewn withdatedthings—dated in the sense of being before or after each other.[555]The date of a thing is a mere relation ofbeforeorafterthe present thing or some past or future thing. Some things we date simply by mentally tossing them into the past or futuredirection. So in space we think of England as simply to the eastward, of Charleston as lying south. But, again, we may date an event exactly, by fitting it between two terms of a past or future series explicitly conceived, just as we may accurately think of England or Charleston being just so many miles away.[556]

The things and events thus vaguely or exactly dated become thenceforward those signs and symbols of longer time-spaces, of which we previously spoke. According as we think of a multitude of them, or of few, so we imagine the time they represent to be long or short. Butthe original paragon and prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.

Now, to what element in the brain-process may this sensibility be due?It cannot, as we have seen, be due to the mere duration itself of the process; it must be due to an element present at every moment of the process, and this element must bear the same inscrutablesortof relation to its correlative feeling which all other elements of neural activity bear to their psychic products, be the latter what they may. Several suggestions have been made as to what the element is in the case of time. Treating of them in a note,[557]I will try to express briefly the only conclusion whichseems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts—unripe though that conclusion be.

The phenomena of 'summation of stimuli' in the nervous system prove that each stimulus leaves some latent activitybehind it which only gradually passes away. (See above,pp. 82-85.) Psychological proof of the same fact is afforded by those 'after-images' which we perceive when a sensorial stimulus is gone. We may read off peculiarities in an after-image, left by an object on the eye, which we failed to note in the original. We may 'hark back' and take in the meaning of a sound several seconds after it has ceased. Delay for a minute, however, and the echo itself of the clock or the question is mute; present sensations have banished it beyond recall. With the feeling of the present thing there must at all times mingle the fading echo of all those other things which the previous few seconds have supplied. Or, to state it in neural terms,there is at every moment a cumulation of brain-processes overlapping each other, of which the fainter ones are the dying phases of processes which but shortly previous were active in a maximal degree. Theamount of the overlappingdetermines the feeling of theduration occupied. What eventsshall appear to occupy the duration depends on justwhat processesthe overlapping processes are.We know so little of the intimate nature of the brain's activity that even where a sensation monotonously endures, we cannot say that the earlier moments of it donot leave fading processes behind which coexist with those of the present moment.Duration and events together form our intuition of the specious present with its content.[558]Whysuch an intuition should result from such a combination of brain-processes I do not pretend to say. All I aim at is to state the mostelementalform of the psycho-physical conjunction.

I have assumed that the brain-processes are sensational ones. Processes of active attention (see Mr. Ward's account inFootnote 556) will leave similar fading brain-processes behind. If the mental processes are conceptual, a complication is introduced of which I will in a moment speak. Meanwhile, still speaking of sensational processes, a remark of Wundt's will throw additional light on the account I give. As is known, Wundt and others have proved that every act of perception of a sensorial stimulus takes an appreciable time. When two different stimuli—e.g. a sight and a sound—are given at once or nearly at once, we have difficulty in attending to both, and may wrongly judge their interval, or even invert their order. Now, as the result of his experiments on such stimuli. Wundt lays down this law:[559]that of the three possible determinations we may make of their order—

"namely, simultaneity, continuous transition, and discontinuous transition—only the first and last are realized,never the second. Invariably, when we fail to perceive the impressions as simultaneous, we notice a shorter or longer empty time between them,which seems to correspond to the sinking of one of the ideas and to the rise of the other.... For our attention may share itself equally between the two impressions, which will then compose one total percept [and be simultaneously felt]; or it may be so adapted to one event as to causeit to be perceived immediately, and then the second event can be perceived only after a certain time of latency, during which the attention reaches its effective maximum for it and diminishes for the first event. In this case the events are perceived astwo, and in successive order—that is, as separated by a time-interval in which attention is not sufficiently accommodated to either to bring a distinct perception about.... While we are hurrying from one to the other, everything between them vanishes in the twilight of general consciousness."[560]

One might call this thelaw of discontinuous succession in time, of percepts to which we cannot easily attend at once.Each percept then requires a separate brain-process; and when one brain-process is at its maximum, the other would appear perforce to be in either a waning or a waxing phase. If our theory of the time-feeling be true, empty timemustthen subjectively appear to separate the two percepts, no matter how close together they may objectively be; for, according to that theory, the feeling of a time-duration is the immediate effect of such an overlapping of brain-processesof different phase—wherever and from whatever cause it may occur.

To pass, now, to conceptual processes: Suppose I think of the Creation, then of the Christian era, then of the battle of Waterloo, all within a few seconds. These matters have their dates far outside the specious present. The processes by which I think them, however, all overlap. What events, then, does the specious present seem to contain? Simply my successiveacts of thinkingthese long-past things, not the long-past things themselves. As the instantly-present thought may be of a long-past thing, so the just-past thought may be of another long-past thing. When a long-past event is reproduced in memory and conceived with its date, the reproduction and conceiving traverse the specious present. The immediate content of the latter is thus all mydirect experiences, whether subjective or objective. Some of these meanwhile may berepresentativeof other experiences indefinitely remote.

The number of these direct experiences which the specious present and immediately-intuited past may embrace measures the extent of our 'primary,' as Exner calls it, or, as Richet calls it, of our 'elementary' memory.[561]The sensation resultant from the overlapping is that of the duration which the experiences seem to fill. As is the number of any larger set of events to that of these experiences, so we suppose is the length of that duration to this duration. But of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing sense.' The variations in our appreciation of the same amount of real time may possibly be explained by alterations in the rate of fading in the images, producing changes in the complication of superposed processes, to which changes changed states of consciousness may correspond. But howeverlong we may conceivea space of time to be, the objective amount of it which isdirectly perceivedat any one moment by us can never exceed the scope of our 'primary memory' at the moment in question.[562]

We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Bær has indulged[563]in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling-water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.

"A gnat's wings," says Mr Spencer,[564]"make ten or fifteen thousand strokes a second. Each stroke implies a separate nervous action. Each such nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as appreciable by the gnat as is a quick movement of his arm by a man. And if this, or anything like this, is the fact, then the time occupied by a given external change, measured by many movements in the one case, must seem much longer than in the other case, when measured by one movement."

In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and erethe end is reached the beginning seems already to date from indefinitely long ago. We enter a short street, and it is as if we should never get to the end of it. This alteration might conceivably result from an approach to the condition of Von Bær's and Spencer's short-lived beings. If our discrimination of successions became finer-grained, so that we noted ten stages in a process where previously we only noted one; and if at the same time the processes faded ten times as fast as before; we might have a specious present of the same subjective length as now, giving us the same time-feeling and containing as many distinguishable successive events, but out from the earlier end of it would have dropped nine tenths of the real events it now contains. They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merely dated memories, reproducible at will. The beginning of our sentences would have to be expressly recalled; each word would appear to pass through consciousness at a tenth of its usual speed. The condition would, in short, be exactly analogous to the enlargement of space by a microscope; fewer real things at once in the immediate field of view, but each of them taking up more than its normal room, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally far away.

Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly without the compensating increase in the subdivisibility of successions. Here the apparent length of the specious present contracts. Consciousness dwindles to a point, and loses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of its path. Express acts of memory replace rapid bird's-eye views. In my own case, something like this occurs in extreme fatigue. Long illnesses produce it. Occasionally, it appears to accompany aphasia.[565]It would be vain to seekto imagine the exact brain-change in any of these cases But we must admit the possibility that to some extent the variations of time-estimate between youth and age, and excitement andennui, are due to such causes, more immediate than to the one we assigned some time ago.

But whether our feeling of the time which immediately-past[566]events have filled be of something long or of something short, it is not what it is because those events are past,butbecause they have left behind them processes which are present. To those processes, however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling a specious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished into the past.As the Creator is supposed to have made Adam with a navel—sign of a birth which never occurred—so He might instantaneously make a man with a brain in which were processes just like the 'fading' ones of an ordinary brain. The first real stimulus after creation would set up a process additional to these. The processes would overlap; and the new-created man would unquestionably have the feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of having been in existence already some little space of time.

Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration—the specious present—varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically. Kant's notion of anintuitionof objective time as an infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it. Thecauseof the intuition which we really have cannot be thedurationof our brain-processes or our mental changes. That duration is rather theobjectof the intuition which, being realized at every moment of such duration, must be due to a permanently present cause. This cause—probably the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phase—fluctuates; and hence a certain range of variation in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility, accrues.

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