THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 631 



latter would be limited, iu his case, to the few seconds im- 

 mediately passing by. Time older than tliat he would never 

 recall. I assume reproduction in the text, because I am 

 speaking of human beings who notoriously possess it. Thus 

 memory gets strewn with dated things — dated in the sense 

 of being before or after each other. * The date of a thing 

 is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some 

 past or future thing. Some things we date simply by men- 

 tally tossing them into the past or future dWedion. So in 

 space we think of England as simply to the eastward, oi 

 Charleston as lying south. But, again, we may date an event 

 exactly, by fitting it between two terms of a past or future 

 series explicitly conceived, just as we may accurately' think 

 of England or Charleston being just so many miles away, f 

 The things and events thus vaguely or exactly dated 

 become tlienceforAvard those signs and symbols of longer 

 time-spaces, of whicii we previously spoke. According as 

 we think of a multitude of them, or of few, so we imagine 

 the time they represent to be long or short. But the original 

 paragon and prototype of all conceived times is the specious 

 'present, the short duration oj ivhich ive are immediately and in- 

 cessantly sensible. 



* '• ' No more ' and 'not yet ' are the proper time- feelings, and we are 

 aware of time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volk- 

 mann (Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictl}- true of our feeling of 

 time pel se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date 

 in its events. 



f We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in 

 the cars makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes. 

 When those that have passed from present sight revive in memor}^ they 

 maintain their mutual order because their contents overlap. We think 

 them as having been before or behind each other; and, from the multituae 

 of the views we can recall behind the one now presented, we compute the 

 total space we have passed through. 



It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of 

 space, because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterday 

 and after to-morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that 

 exceed as greatly their unit of space-intuition. Recently I heard my child 

 of four tell a visitor that he had been ' as much as one week ' in the country. 

 As he had been there three months, the visitor expressed surprise; where- 

 upon the child corrected himself by saying he had been there 'twelve 

 years.' But the child made exactly the same kind of mistake when he 

 asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distance 

 being three miles. 



