96 MENTAL OPERATIONS IN RELATION TO TIME. 



ment in hand. An instance familiar to all is that 

 sudden and entire absorption of consciousness by some 

 inward thought, even when the senses are submitted 

 to the strongest impressions from without, as from the 

 loudest swell of a Handel chorus or the rudest noises 

 of a London street, or when fronting the Matterhorn 

 or the Niagara Falls. The physical action on the 

 organs of sense is the same, but the mind is working 

 within itself, and all perception of external objects 

 utterly annulled for a time. But let this cause of 

 distraction be removed, and the mind is suddenly 

 opened to the objects of sense before it, which may 

 themselves again be as suddenly suspended by some 

 new and abstracting thought. Or suppose some strong 

 agitation of the mind, from whatever cause. For the 

 moment it displaces all perception or feeling of other 

 things, but is itself as suddenly obliterated by the in- 

 trusion of other objects of sensation or thought, recur- 

 ring in all its force when these objects are removed. 

 Such alternations of state, repeated again and again 

 more or less rapidly, must be familiar to everyone even 

 commonly observant of his mental relation to the daily 

 incidents of life. In truth the whole of mental life 

 consists in these successive changes, so far interpreted 

 by time that each one may be regarded as having its 

 own identity, however momentary in duration and how- 

 ever linked with antecedents and consequents by what 

 seems an inseparable continuity. 



I believe, however, that more may be done ana- 

 lytically by taking time as a basis than in any other 

 way. It requires, indeed, that faculty which few can 



