THE CONCEPTUAL WORLD 33 



fifth notch the muscle ceased to contract and began to 

 relax, and at the forty-second notch the muscle had 

 ceased to contract. Everything now becomes clear 

 and easy to represent mentally ; the time-lever makes 

 100 notches on the paper in a second, so that there was 

 an interval of 0.07 seconds between the two stimuli, 

 and these two stimuli produced a compound contraction 

 of the muscle lasting for o.i second. This is what the 

 experimenters might have perceived, had human un- 

 aided senses been sufficiently acute. But they are 

 not, and so the crude perception of the results of the 

 experiment is replaced by a conception of the train 

 of events involved in the operation. Duration and 

 succession disappear and the myogram represents only 

 a series of simultaneous events of this nature ; the 

 first stimulus occurs simultaneously with the tenth 

 movement of the time-lever ; the second stimulus 

 with the seventeenth, and so on. In seeing the ex- 

 periment the operators had to wait for one phase to 

 be completed before they could observe another one, 

 but in reasoning about it all the phases are spread out 

 and are present in the conception at once. The 

 duration was in the operators but not in the experi- 

 ment : it was experienced, but it disappears when the 

 results of the experiment are conceptualised. 



A succession of events is in ourselves and not in 

 the events observed. If a point is said to move along 

 the locus OD through the positions A, B, C, it is we 

 that have the feeling of succession, and the whole 

 trajectory, or locus, or path of the point corresponds 

 with a portion of our duration. The operation of 

 boiling the kettle corresponds with a portion of our 

 duration, which in its turn corresponds with that part 

 of our duration which was marked by the positions 

 of the hands of the clock. Thus we perceive a simul- 



