MEASURE OF TIME. 255 



rapid. Sucli a man would, in the whole course of his life, only 

 witness one revolution of the moon ; the change of the seasons he 

 would be acquainted with only by tradition ; and many genera- 

 tions might have passed away since that period of great cold 

 which we call winter. Reduced once more to one thousandth 

 part, that is to say to a lifetime of forty to forty-two minutes 

 (such as that of many Ephemerae), to such a being the alter- 

 nation of day and night would be unknown; and if he were 

 sufficiently intelligent to notice that during his life the sun had 

 approached a little towards the western horizon, he would have 

 no ground for supposing that that luminary would ever again 

 rise in the east. If we follow the line of argument as to in- 

 creased duration, we may imagine the life of man a thousand 

 times as long, and his sensorial power of receiving impressions 

 a thousand times as slow as it actually is, in fact so slow that 

 day and night would disappear for him, and the sun would no 

 longer appear as a ball, but as a fiery ring; for it is well known 

 that a ball when swung round on a string appears like a ring as 

 soon as it attains such a velocity as to exceed our perceptive 

 faculty." 



A rational creature whose lifetime should embrace merely a 

 period of a single day, would therefore acquire quite a different 

 conception of the world from one who might live for a hundred 

 or a thousand years, and by this means the measure which the 

 long-lived individual would apply to the universe must become 

 quite different from that of the ephemeral creature. But the life- 

 time of Man, the innate human measure of time, is excessively 

 minute when compared with the duration of the universe. We 



" How fleet is a glance of the mind ! 



Compar'd with the speed of its flight, 

 The tempest itself lags behind 



And the swift-winged arrows of light. 

 When I think of my own native land 



In a moment I seem to be there." 



It is difficult to set bounds to the development of the human mind, even 

 under imaginary cases of a great reduction or an extraordinary extension of 

 the term of human life. EDITOR.] 



