The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* The ouly objections to this which I can think of are : (1) The accuracy with which some men judge of the hour of day or night without looking at the clock ; (2) the faculty some have of waking at a preappointed hour; (8) the accuracy of time-perception reported to exist in certain trance-subjects. It might seem that in these persons some sort of a sub-conscious record was kept of the lapse of time per se. But this cannot be admitted until it is proved that there are no physiological processes, the feeling of whose course may serve as a sign of how much time has sped, and so lead us to infer the hour. That there are such processes it is hardly possible to doubt. An ingenious friend of mine was long puzzled to know why each day of the week had such a characteristic physiognomy to him. That of Sunday was soon noticed to be due to the cessation of the city's rumbling, and the sound of people's feet shuffling on the sidewalk; of Monday, to come from the clothes drying in the yard and casting a white reflection on the ceiling; of Tuesday, to a cause which I forget ; and I think my friend did not get beyond Wednesday. Probably each hour in the day has for most of us some outer or inner sign associated with it as closely as these signs with the days of the week. It must be admitted, after all, however, that the great improvement of the time-perception during sleep and trance is a mystery not as yet cleared up. All my life I have been struck by the accuracy with which I will wake at the same exact minute night after night and morning after morning, if only the habit fortuitously begins. The organic registra tion in me is independent of sleep.

After lying in bed a long time awake I suddenly rise without knowing the time, and for days and weeks together will do so at an identical minute by the clock, as if some inward physio logical process caused the act by punctually running down.— Idiots are said sometimes to possess the time-measuring faculty in a marked degree. I have an interesting manuscript account of an idiot girl which says : was punctual almost to a minute in her demand for food and other regular attentions Her dinner was generally furnished her at l: that hour she would begin to scream if it were not forthcoming. Fast-day or Thanksgiving it were delayed, in accordance witl England custom, she screamed from her usual dinner-hour until was carried to her. On the next day, however, she again made known want« nromnti" »« 12.30. Any slight attention shown her on one day was

From tliis we pass naturally to speak of certain familial variations in our estimation of lengths of time. In general, a time Jilled ivitli 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 siglit-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 multitudinoiisness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immedi ately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monot ony, familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Yon 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 ail without becoming dizzy — at any rate not now. And yet again, when 11 look at the village, at the church -tower, it seems as if I could hardlj have been seven days away." Prof. Lazarus * (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, the

demanded on the next at the corresponding hour. If an orange were given her at 4 P.M. on Wednesday, at the same hour on Thursday she made known her expectation, and if the fruit were not given her she continued to call for it at intervals for two or three hours. At four on Friday the process would be repeated but would last less long ; and so on for two or three days. If one of her sisters visited her accidentally at a certain hour, the sharp piercing scream was sure to summon her at the same hour the next day," etc., etc.— For these obscure matters consult C. Du Prel : The Philosophy of Mysticism, chap. in. § 1.

first, 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 un changed, that it seems as if only a week of J:ime could have come be tween."

The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older — that is, the clays, 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/ and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There is a law, lie 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 yV of his whole life_a man of 50 as ^, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length. This formula roughly ex presses 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, sub jective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveiiess strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and longdrawn-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 recol lection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself. A clay 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. Tcedium, ennui, Langwetle, 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 experi ences, ceaselessly i enewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself.* 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 in credible. 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 time per se, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision. The odiousness of the whole expe rience comes from its insipidity ; for stimulation is the indis pensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have.f The sensation of tsedium is a protest, says Volkmann, against the entire present.

* "Empty time is most strongly perceived when it comes as a pause in mus'.e or in speech. Suppose a preacher in the pulpit, a professor at his desk, to stick still in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as is sometimes purposety done) make all his instruments stop at once; we await every instant the resumption of the performance, and, in this awaiting, per ceive, more than in any other possible way, the empty time. To change the example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music — a figure, for instance, in which a tangle of melodies are under way— suddenly a single voice be heard, which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed. . . . This one note will appear very protracted — why? Because we expect to hear accom panying it the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come." (Herbart: PsychoL als \V. , §115.) — Compare also Munsterberg, Beitraga Heft 2, p. 41.

+ A night of pr.iu will seem terribly lone: we keep looking forward t<3 Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each step an object tve have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way. A space we meas ure 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 spa ciousness than one of which we only note the content.*

I do not say that everything in these fluctuations of esti mate 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 by ennui some deeper cause may be at work. This cause can only be ascertained, if it exist, by finding out why ice per ceive 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 percep tions, light and sound, respond." But we hasten to add that neither light nor sound copy or mirror the ether- or air-waves ; they represent them only symbolically. The only case, says Helmholtz, in which such copying occurs, and in which a moment which never comes — the moment when it shall cease. But the odiousness of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile, like the odionsness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive odiousness of the pain, rather, is what tiuges our memory of the night. What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says (op. cit. p. 202), is the long time of the suffering, not the suffering of the long time per se.

* On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of Time, in Mind, vol. m. p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305; W. Wundt. Fhysiol. Psych., n. 287, 288; besides the essays quoted from Lazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare Volkraann's Lehrbucli d. Psych., § 89, and for refer ences to other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir. Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great's life (thirty three years), which seems to us as if it must be long, because it was r" eventful S'milar.y the English Commonwealth, etc.

"our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that oi the time-succession of phenomena. Simultaneity, succession, and the regular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sen sations 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." *

One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pur suing 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 things should be* come 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 timerelations 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 per ceived by the mind.

This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's succes sions as forces stamping their image on the mind,f still, between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as be tween the object and subject of any casv> of cognition in the world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feel ing of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feel ing of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an

f Succession, time per se, is no force. Our talk about its devouring tooth, etc., is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of in ertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything. additional fact requiring its own special elucidation, which this talk about outer time-relations stamping copies of them selves within, leaves all untouched. I have shown, at the outset of the article, that what is past, to be known as past, must be known with what is present, and during the '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. Volkmanu 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 mem bers, 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 succession in thought is not the thought of succession. If idea A follows idea B, consciousness simply exchanges one for another. That B comes after A is for our consciousness a non existent fact; for this after is 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 if A and B are to be represented as occurring in succession they must be simultaneously represented; if we are to think of them as one after the other, we must think them both at once." *

If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by an horizontal line, the thought of the 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica, page 64. He says :

"We may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simul taneity 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 time as it is, and -with the latter in treating of our intuition of time, where, just as in a perspective representation of distance, \ve are confined to lines in a plane at right angles to the actual line of depth. In a succes sion of events, say of sense-impressions, ABODE. . . , the presence of B means the absence of A and 0, but the presentation of this succes sion 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 ;n consciousness simultaneously."

There is thus a sort of perspective projection of past ob jects upon present consciousness, similar to that of wide landscapes upon a camera-screen. And since we saw a while ago that our maximum dis tinct intuition of 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 that this amount of duration is pictured fairly steadily in each passing instant of consciousness by virtue of some fairly con stant feature in the brain-process to which the conscious ness is tied. This feature of the brain-process, whatever it be, must be the came of our perceiving the fact of time at all* The duration thus steadily perceived is hardly more than the ' specious present,' as it was called a few pages back. Its content is 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. Mean while, 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, after it 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 of reproductive memory, and yet have the time-sense ; but the

Jitter would be limited, in his case, to tlie few seconds im mediately 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 with dated things-dated in the sense of being before or after each other. * The date of a thing is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some past or future thing. Some things we date simply by men tally tossing them into the past or future direction So in space we think of England as simply to the eastward oi 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, f 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. But the original paragon and prototype of all conceived times is the specious 'present, the short duration of wliicli we are immediately and in cessantly sensible.

* " ' No more ' and 'not yet ' are the proper time-feelings, and we are aware of time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volkmann (Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictly true of oiir feeling of time pe1) se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of dctte in its events. f We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in ihe cars makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes. When those that have passed from present sight revive in memory, they maintain tneir mutual order because their contents overlap. We think them as having been before or behind each other; and, from the multitude of the views we can recall behind the one now presented, we compute the total space we have passed through.

It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of space, because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterday and after to-morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that exceed as greatly their unit of space-intuition. Recently I heard my child of four tell a visitor that he had been ' as much as one week ' in the country. As he had been there three months, the visitor expressed surprise; where upon the child corrected himself by saying he had been there 'twelve years.' But the child made exactly the same kind of mietake when he asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distance being three miles.

Now, to wliat dement in the brain-process may this sensibil ity 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 inscrutable sort of relation to its cor relative 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, * I will try to express briefly the only conclusion which

* Most of these explanations simply give the signs which, adhering to impressions, lead us to dale them within a duration, or, in other words, to assign to them their order. Why it should be a time-order, however, is not explained. Herbart's would-be explanation is a simple description of time-perception. He says it comes when, with the last member of a series present to our consciousness, we also think of the first; and then the whole series revives in onr thought at once, but with strength diminishing in the backward direction (Psychol. als Wiss., § 115; Lehrb. zur Psychol., §$ 171, 172, 175). Similarly Drobisch, who adds that the series must appear as one already elapsed (durchlaufene), a word which shows even more clearly the question-begging nature of this sort of account (Empirische Psychol., § 59). Th. Waitz is guilty of similar question-begging when he explains our timeconsciousness to be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to make our percepts agree with our expectations (Lehrb. d. Psychol., § 52). Volkmaun's mythological account of past representations striving to drive pres ent ones out of the seat of consciousness, being driven back by them, etc., suffers from the same fallacy (Psychol., § 87). But all such accounts agree in implying one fact — viz., that the brain-processes of various events must be active simultaneously, and in varying strength, for a time-perception to be possible. Later authors have made this idea more precise. Thus, Lipps : " Sensations arise, occupy consciousness, fade into images, and vanish. According as two of them, a and b, go through this process simultaneously, or as one precedes or follows the other, the phases of their fading w7ill agree or differ; and the difference will be proportional to the time-difference between their several moments of beginning.

Thus there are differences of quality in the images, which the mind may translate into corresponding differences of their temporal order. There is no other possible middle term between the objective time-relations and those in the mind than these differences of phase." (Grundtatsacheu des Seelenlebens, p. 588.) Lipps accordingly calls them ' temporal signs,' and hastens explicitly to add that the soul's translation of their order of strength into a time-order is entirely 'nexplicable (p. 591). M. Guyau's account (Revue Philosophique, xix. 353) hardly differs from that of his predecessors, except in picturesqueuess of style. Every change leaves a series of trainees lumineuses in the mind like

seems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts — uoiripe though that conclusion be. the passage of shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase, according as its original was more remote. This group of images gives duration, the mere time-form, the ' bed' of time. The distinction of past, present, and future within the bed comes from our active nature. The future (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got, and must wait for. All this is doubtless true, but is no explanation.