THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 625 



first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and 

 he reels with the fuhiess of his vision. . . . Then the inner eye turns 

 away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especially 

 to the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so 

 that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. The 

 one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so un 

 changed, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come be 

 tween." 



The same space of time seems shorter as ive grow older — 

 that is, the days, the months, and the years do so ; whether 

 the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to 

 all apj)earance remain about the same. 



"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question 

 himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped 

 much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let 

 any one remember his last eight or ten school years : it is the space of a 

 century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life : it is 

 the space of an hour." 



So writes Prof. Patil Janet,* and gives a solution wliich can 

 hardly be said to diminish the myster}-. There is a law, he 

 says, by wliich the apparent length of an interval at a given 

 epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of 

 the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as jL of his whole 

 life — a man of 50 as J^, the whole life meanwhile apparently 

 preserving a constant length. This formula roughly ex- 

 presses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be 

 an elementary psychic law- ; and it is certain that, in great 

 part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow 

 older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the 

 consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. 

 In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, sub- 

 jective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension 

 is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that 

 time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting 

 travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long- 

 drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this 

 experience into automatic routine w'hich we hardly note at 

 all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recol- 

 lection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and 

 collapse. 



* Revue Pbilosophique, vol. in. p. 496. 



