On these variations of time-estimate, cf.Romanes, Consciousness of Time.in Mind, vol.III.p.297; J.Sully, Illusions, pp.245-261, 302-305; W.Wundt, Physiol.Psych., II.287, 288; besides the essays quoted from Lazarus and Janet.In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare Volkmann's Lehrbuch d.Psych., § 89, and for references 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 so eventful.Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc.
Physiol Optik, p.445.
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 innertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything.
Lehrbuch d.Psych., § 87.Compare also H.Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154.
The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived!
"'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 our feeling of time per se , as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date in its events.
We construct the miles just as we construct the years.Travelling in the 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 their 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; whereupon the child corrected himself by saying he had been there 'twelve years.'
But the child made exactly the same kind of mistake when he asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distance being three miles.
Most of these explanations simply give the signs which, adhering to impressions, lead us to date 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 our 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 time-consciousness to be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to make our percepts agree with our expectations (Lehrb.d.Psychol., § 52).Volkmann's mythological account of past representations striving to drive present 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 will 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." (Grundtatsachen 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 inexplicable (p.591).M.Guyau's account (Revue Philosophique, XIX.353) hardly differs from that of his predecessors, except in picturesqueness of style.Every change leaves a series of trainées lumineuses in the mind like 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.
Mr.Ward gives, in his Encyclopædia Britannica article (Psychology.
p.65, col.1), a still more refined attempt to specify the 'temporal sign.'
