THE SENSE OF TIME.
=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 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
has been well called 'the specious' present, a sort of saddle-back of
time with a certain length 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 as parts of this
_duration-block_ that the relation of _succession_ of one end to the
other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other
after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of
time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with
its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a
synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its
elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily
decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.
The moment we pass beyond a very few seconds our consciousness of
duration ceases to be an immediate perception and becomes a construction
more or less symbolic. To realize even an hour, we must count 'now! now!
now! now!' indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feeling of a separate _bit_
of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a clear impression on
our mind. The _longest bit of duration_ which we can apprehend at once
so as to discriminate it from longer and shorter bits of time would seem
(from experiments made for another purpose in Wundt's laboratory) to be
about 12 seconds. _The shortest interval_ which we can feel as time at
all would seem to be 1/500 of a second. That is, Exner recognized two
electric sparks to be successive when the second followed the first at
that interval.
=We have no sense for empty time.= 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 the
_filling_ of the time, and to our _memory_ of 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 show that the latter
alternative is the true one, and that _we can no more perceive a
duration than we can perceive an extension, devoid of all sensible
content_. Just as with closed eyes we see 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 of
_changing process_ remains 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 of _change_ is 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.
=Appreciation of Longer Durations.=--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's _discrete flow_. The discreteness
is, however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts of
_recognition_ or _apperception_ of _what_ it is are discrete. The
sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be. All continuous
sensations are _named_ in 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, we _take it in_
in 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. When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is
absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as a
_name_, or by running over a few salient _dates_ therein, with no
pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one
has anything like a _perception_ of 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 more
_multitudinous_ thing. 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 time-_intuition_
in these cases at all. It is but dates and events representing time,
their abundance symbolizing its 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 that measure them.
From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familiar 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 yields hardly 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.
_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. An old man probably does not _feel_ his past life to be any longer
than he did when he was a boy, though it may be a dozen times as long.
In most men all the events of manhood's years are of such familiar
_sorts_ that the individual impressions do not last. At the same time
more and more of the earlier events get forgotten, the result being that
no greater multitude of distinct objects remains in the memory.
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 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. Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a
minute has elapsed, and 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 time _per se_,
and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained
successive subdivision. The _odiousness_ of the whole experience comes
from its insipidity; for _stimulation_ is the indispensable requisite
for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least
stimulating experience we can have. The sensation of tedium is a
_protest_, says Volkmann, against the entire present.
=The feeling of past time is a present feeling.= In reflecting on the
_modus operandi_ of our consciousness of time, we are at first tempted
to suppose it the easiest thing in the world to understand. Our inner
states succeed each other. They know themselves as they are; then of
course, we say, they must know their own succession. But this philosophy
is too crude; for between the mind's own changes _being_ successive, and
_knowing 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 succession is
added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own
special elucidation_, which this talk about the feelings knowing their
time-relations as a matter of course leaves all untouched.
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 at the actual moment of the stream upon which the perpendicular is
raised.
There is thus a sort of _perspective projection_ of 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 distinct _perception_ of
duration hardly covers more than a dozen seconds (while our maximum
vague perception 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
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._ 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. 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, _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 latter
would be limited, in his case, to the few seconds immediately passing
by. In the next chapter, assuming the sense of time as given, we will
turn to the analysis of what happens in reproductive memory, the recall
of _dated_ things.