628 PYSCHOLOGY. 



"our perceptions can truly corresfond with outer reality, is that ot 

 the time-succession of phenomena. Simultaneity, succession, and the 

 regular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sen- 

 sations as in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, take 

 place in time, so that the time-relations of the latter can furnish a true 

 copy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows the 

 sensation of the lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air by 

 the electric discharge reaches the observer's place later than that of the 

 luminiferous ether." * 



One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pur- 

 suing sucli rejections as these, to follow them to a sort of 

 crude speculative conclusion, and to think that he has at 

 last got the mystery of cognition where, to use a vulgar 

 phrase, 'the wool is short.' What more natural, we say, 

 than that the sequences and durations of things should be- 

 come known? The succession of the outer forces stamps 

 itself as a like succession upon the brain. The brain's 

 successive changes are copied exactly by correspondingly 

 successive pulses of the mental stream. The mental stream, 

 feelii)g itself, must feel the time-relations of its own states. 

 But as these are copies of the outward time-relations, so 

 muLt it know them too. That is to say, these latter time- 

 relations arouse their own cognition ; or, in other words, 

 the mere existence of time in those changes out of the mind 

 which affect the mind is a sufficient cause why time is per- 

 ceived by the mind. 



This philosophy is unfoj'tunately too crude. Even 

 though we icere to conceive the outer successions as forces 

 stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's succes- 

 sions as forces stamping their image on the mind,f still, 

 between the mind's own changes being successive, and 

 knoiving their ovm succession, lies as broad a chasm as be- 

 tween the object and subject of any casv? of cognition in the 

 world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is rvd a feel- 

 ing of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feel- 

 ing of their oion succession is added, that must he treated as an 



* Physiol. Optik, p. 445. 



t Succession, time per se, is no force. Our talk about its devouring 

 tooth, etc.. is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of in- 

 ertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as au etficient cause of 

 anything. 



