482 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Columbia University, and at 8:15 P. M. at the American Museum of Natural 

 History, Vice-President Meyer presiding. 

 The following program was offered: 



Afternoon Session. 



R. S. Woodworth, Imagery of Time Relations. 



H. H. Woodrow, Reaction Time as Influenced by the Irregular 



Recurrence of the Stimulus. 

 Will S. Monroe, Memories for Faces. 



Edward L. Thomdike, Practise as a Purely Intellectual Function. 



Evening Session. 



H. A. Can, Some Involuntary Illusions of Depth. 



H. D. Marsh, Psychological Implicates of Certain Linguistic 



Expressions. 

 A. C. Armstrong, The Idea of Feeling in Rousseau's Religious 



Philosophy. 

 Max Eastman, The Pragmatic Meaning of Pragmatism. 



Summary of Papers. 



Professor Woodworth noted the disproportion between our rich supply of 

 time concepts and our meager perceptual experience of time, and proposed 

 to test the hypothesis that time concepts were really composed of spatial 

 concepts or images suflFused with a temporal feeling. Mathematically, 

 time can be represented by a point, or better, a line or plane, moving along 

 a line or axis, the present being any chosen position of the moving point, 

 the past to the left, and the future to the right. All units and relations of 

 time could be accurately represented in such a scheme. On examining a 

 considerable number of persons, he found that such spatial representations 

 of time occurred, though seldom, if ever, in a mathematically consistent form. 

 Spatial forms for the year, as well as for the centuries, and for past and 

 future, were not uncommon, being apparently considerably more common 

 than the somewhat similar "number forms," though often less distinct and 

 less clearly conscious. But such time forms are not universally present; 

 they have been found in about half of the forty individuals so far questioned. 

 Of those who do not have them, some think of time concretely, i. e., in terms 

 of events or changes; while others employ what seem to be purely abstract 

 concepts of time. 



