CHAPTER XV.* THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. In the next two chapters I shall deal with what is sometimes called internal perception, or the perception of time, and of events as occupying a date therein, especially when the date is a past one, in which case the perception in question goes by the name of memory. To remember a thing as past, it is necessary that the notion of ' past' should be one of our 'ideas.' We shall see in the chapter on Memory that many things come to be thought by us as past, not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but rather because they are associated with other things which for us signify pastness. But how do these things get their pastness? What is the original of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term? It is this question which the reader is invited to consider in the present chapter. We shall see that we have a constant feeling sui generis of pastness, to which every one of our experiences in turn falls a prey. To think a thing as past is to think it amongst the objects or in the direction of the objects which at the present moment appear affected by this quality. This is the original of our notion of past time, upon which memory and history build their systems. And in this chapter we shall consider this immediate sense of time alone. If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of bead-like sensations and images, all separate, 66 we never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations ceased it would be gone for ever; and we should be as if we had never been. We should be wholly *This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xx. p. 374. incapable of acquiring experience. Even if our ideas were associ- We might, nevertheless, under these circumstances, act in a rational way, provided the mechanism which produced our trains of images produced them in a rational order. We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware of any word except the one just on our lips; we should decide upon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the total grounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like a glow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whether a very highly developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful; it is, however, conceivable. I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off our real nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus contracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimensions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing. A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstraction, and all our concrete states of mind are representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Objects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present thought is of ABCDEFG, the next one will be of BCDEFGH, and the one after that of CDEFGHI— the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss. These lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and the prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to * James Mill, Analysis, vol. 1. p. 319 (J. S. Mill's Edition). consciousness without which it could not be called a stream.* * What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. . . . The simultaneous percep tion of both sub-feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence, is the total feeling-the minimum of consciousness--and this minimum has duration. . . . Time-duration, however, is inseparable from the minimum, notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which part of it came first, which last. . . . We do not require to know that the subfeelings come in sequence, first one, then the other; nor to know what coming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially isolated minimum of consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and latter in time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling that grows stronger, and the change between them. . . ‘In the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involved in the minimum of consciousness. The first beginnings of it appear in that minimum, just as the first beginnings of perception do. As each member of the change or difference which goes to compose that minimum is the rudiment of a single perception, so the priority of one member to the other, although both are given to consciousness in one empirical present moment, is the rudiment of memory. The fact that the minimum of consciousness is difference or change in feelings, is the ultimate explanation of memory as well as of single perceptions. A former and a latter are included in the minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the course of time into past, present, and future; but, strictly speaking, there is no present; it is composed of past and future divided by an indivisible point or instant. That instant, or time-point, is the strict present. What we call, loosely, the present, is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least a minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is the present time-point. . . . If we take this as the present time-point, it is clear that the minimum of feeling contains two portions—a sub-feeling that goes and a sub-feeling that comes. One is remembered, the other imagined. The limits of both are indefinite at beginning and end of the minimum, and ready to melt into other minima, proceeding from other stimuli. Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out into minima; we have to do that by reflection, asking ourselves, What is the least empirical moment of consciousness? That least empirical moment is what we usually call the present moment; and even this is too minute for ordinary use; the present moment is often extended practically to a few seconds, or even minutes, beyond which we specify what length of time we mean, as the present hour, or day, or year, or century. But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers even of philosophically-minded people, and they talk about the present as if it was a datum--as if time came to us marked into present periods like a THE SENSIBLE PRESENT HAS DURATION. Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson, says, "Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi," and it is only as entering into the living and moving organization of a much wider tract of time that the strict present is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philosophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion measuring-tape." (S. H. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, vol. I. pp. 248-254.) "The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certain amount of it must be presented together-included between its initial and terminal limit. A continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another, would indeed occupy time, but not represent it, for it would exchange one element of succession for another instead of grasping the whole succession at once. Both points-the beginning and the end-are equally essential to the conception of time, and must be present with equal clearness together." (Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.) "Assume that . . . similar pendulum-strokes follow each other at regular intervals in a consciousness otherwise void. When the first one is over, an image of it remains in the fancy until the second succeeds. This, then, reproduces the first by virtue of the law of association by similarity, but at the same time meets with the aforesaid persisting image. . . Thus does the simple repetition of the sound provide all the elements of time. perception. The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives the beginning, the second the end, and the persistent image in the fancy represents the length of the interval. At the moment of the second impression, the entire time-perception exists at once, for then all its elements are presented together, the second sound and the image in the fancy immediately, and the first impression by reproduction. But, in the same act, we are aware of a state in which only the first sound existed, and of another in which only its image existed in the fancy. Such a consciousness as this is that of time. In it no succession of ideas takes place." (Wundt: Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 681-2.) Note here the assumption that the persistence and the reproduction of an impression are two processes which may go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt's description is merely an attempt to analyze the 'deliverance' of a time-perception, and no explanation of the manner in which it comes about. that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience. The only fact of our immediate experience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called 'the specious present.' His words deserve to be quoted in full:* 66 'The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three . . nonentities-the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present." In short, the practically cognized present is no knifeedge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end. † It is only *The Alternative, p. 167. Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflection on the succession of our ideas (Essay, book II. chap. XIV. § 3; chap. xv. § 12). Reid justly remarks that if ten successive elements are to make duration," then one must make duration, otherwise duration must be made up of parts that have no duration, which is impossible. . . . I conclude, therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval or element of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that every elementary part of duration must have duration, as every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, it must be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals of successive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must conceive them to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that there is a conception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the mind." (Intellectual Powers, essay III. chap. v.) Qu'on ne cherche point," says Royer Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of Reid, |