606 PSYCHOLOGY. 



incapable of acquiring experience. - . . Even if our ideas were associ- 

 ated in trains, but only as they are in imagination, we should still b© 

 ■without the capacity of acquiring knowledge. One idea, upon this 

 supposition, would follow another. But that would be all. Each of 

 our successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would be 

 gone forever. Each of those momentary states would be our whole 

 being." * 



We miglit, nevertheless, under tnese circumstances, act 

 in a rational way, provided the mechanism which produced 

 our trains of images produced them in a rational order. 

 We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware of 

 any word except the one just on our lips ; we should decide 

 upon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the total 

 grounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like a 

 glow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately 

 covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whether 

 a very highly developed practical life be possible under 

 such conditions as these is more than doubtful ; it is, how- 

 ever, conceivable. 



I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off our 

 real nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus con- 

 tracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimen- 

 sions of a glow-worm spark. The knoivledge of some other 

 part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is alivays 

 mixed in with our knoivledge of the present thing. 



A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstrac- 

 tion, and all our concrete states of mind are representations 

 of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the com- 

 plexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less 

 degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Ob- 

 jects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present 

 thought is of A B C D E F G , the next one will he of 

 B C D E F G H, and the one after that of C D E F G H I— 

 the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and 

 the incomings of the future making up the loss. These 

 lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the 

 germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and the 

 prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to 



* James Mill. Analysis, vol. i. p. 319 (.J. S. Mill's Edition). 



