THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 633 



seems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts — 

 unripe though that conclusion be. 



the passage of shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase, 

 according as its original was more remote. This group of images gives 

 duration, the mere time-form, the ' bed ' of time. The distinction of past, 

 present, and future within the bed comes from our active nature. The 

 future (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got, and must wait 

 for. All this is doubtless true, but is no explanation. 



Mr. "Ward gives, in his. Encyclopaedia Britannica article (Psychology, 

 p. 65, col. 1), a still more refined attempt to specify the 'temporal sign.* 

 The problem being, among a number of other things thought as successive, 

 but simultaneously thought, to determine which is first and which last, 

 he says: "After each distinct representation, abed, there maj' inter- 

 vene the representation of that movement of attention of which we are aware 

 in passing from one object to another. In our present reminiscence we 

 have, it must be allowed, little direct proof of this intervention ; though 

 there is, I think, indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the flow of ideas 

 to follow the order in which the presentations were at first attended to. 

 With the movement itself when the direction of attention changes, we are 

 familiar enough, though the residua of such movements are not ordinarily 

 conspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs. . . . But tem- 

 poral signs alone will not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the time-per- 

 spective. These give us only a fixed series; but the law of obliviscence, by 

 insuring a progressive variation in intensity as we pass from one member of 

 the series to the other, yields the effect which we call time-distance. By 

 themselves such variations in intensity would leave us liable to confound 

 more vivid representations in the distance with fainter ones nearer the 

 present, but from this mistake the temporal signs save us ; where the 

 memor3'--continuum is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. On 

 the other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though 

 the memory -continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still no 

 such distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearer 

 to the present, where these perceptive effects are considerable. . . . Locke 

 speaks of our ideas succeeding each other ' at certain distances not much 

 unlike the images in the inside of a lantern turned round by the heat of a 

 candle,' and 'guesses' that 'this appearance of theirs in train varies not 

 very much in awaking man.' Now what is this ' distance ' that separates 

 a from b, bfrom c, and so on ; and what means have we of knowing that it 

 is tolerably constant in waking life? It is, probably, that, the residuum of 

 which I ham called a temporal sign; oi\ in other words, it is the movement of 

 attention from a to b." Nevertheless, Mr. Ward does not call our feeling 

 of this movement of attention the original of our feeling of time, or its 

 brain-process the brain-process which directly causes us to perceive time. 

 He says, a moment later, that " though the fixation of attention does of 

 course really occupy time, it is probably not in the first instance perceived 

 as time — i.e. as continuous ' protensity,' to use a term of Hamilton's — but 

 as intensity. Thus, if this supposition be true, there is an element in our 

 concrete time perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception of 

 Time. In Time physically conceived there is no trace of intensity ; in time 



