THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 609 



that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact 

 of our immediate experience. The only fact of our imme- 

 diate experience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called ' the 

 njpecious present.' His words deserve to be quoted in full : * 



" The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. 

 Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time re 

 f erred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous 

 of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. 

 The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past — a 

 recent past — delusively given as being a time that intervenes between 

 the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let 

 the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. 

 All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the 

 present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be 

 contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, 

 no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, 

 considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., 

 the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. 

 Omitting the specious present, it consists of three . . . nonentities — the 

 past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their 

 conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to 

 us in the fiction of the specious present." 



In short, the practically cognized present is no knife- 

 edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own 

 on which we sit perched, and from which we look in tw'o 

 directions into time. The unit of composition of our per- 

 ception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it 

 were — a rearward- and a forward-looking end. f It is only 



* The Alternative, p. 167. 



f Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflec- 

 tion on the succession of our ideas (Essay, book ii. chap. xiv. § 3; chap. 

 XV. § 12). Reid justlj"^ remarks that if ten successive elements are to make 

 duration, "then one must make duration, otherwise duration must be 

 made up of parts that have no duration, which is impossible. ... I con- 

 clude, therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval or 

 element of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, is 

 more certain than that every elementary part of duration must have dura- 

 tion, as every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, it 

 must be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals of 

 successive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must conceive them 

 to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that there is a 

 conception of duration where there is no svccession of ideas in th^ mind." 

 (Intellectual Powers, essay iir. chap, v ) " Qu'on ne cherche point," says 

 Royer Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of Reid, 



