634 P8YCH0L0GT. 



The plienomeua of ' summation of stimuli ' in the nervous 

 system prove that each stimulus leaves some latent activity- 

 psych ically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, and 

 so far literally a perception." Its ' original ' is, then, if I understand Mr. 

 Ward, something like », feeling which accompanies, as pleasure and pain 

 may accompany, the movements of attention. Its braiu-process must, it 

 would seem, be assimilated in general type to the brain-processes of pleasure 

 and pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be Mr. Ward's 

 own view, for he says : " Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by a 

 rapid succession of varied impressions, and equally what it is to be wearied 

 by the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same impressions. Now 

 these ' feelings ' of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualities 

 to movements of attention. In the tirst, attention is kept incessantly on 

 the move ; before it is accommodated to «, it is disturbed by the sudden- 

 ness, intensity, and novelty of b ; in the second, it is kept all but stationary 

 by the repeated presentation of the same impression. Such excess and 

 defect of surprises make one realize a fact which in ordinary life is so 

 obscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments have set this fact in a 

 more striking light, and made clear what Locke had dimly before his mind 

 in talking of a certain distance between the presentations of a waking man. 

 In estimating very short periods of time of a second or less, indicated, say, 

 by the beats of a metronome, it is found that there is a certain period for 

 which the mean of a number of estimates is correct, while .shorter periods 

 are on the whole over-, and longer periods under-estimated. I take this to 

 be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention.' 

 Alluding to the fact that a series of experiences, ab c d e, may seen, 

 shcnt in retrospect, which seemed everlasting in passing, he says: " What 

 tells in retrospect is the series a b c d e, etc.; what tells in the present is the 

 intervening h t^ ta , etc., or rather the original accommodation of which 

 these temporal signs are the residuum." And he concludes thus: "We 

 seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon 

 quasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the duration of which we do not 

 directly experience as duration at all." 



Wundt also thinks that the interval of about three-fourths of a second, 

 which is estimated with the minimum of error, points to a connection 

 between the time-feeling and the succession of distinctly 'apperceived ' 

 objects before the mind. The 'association-time' is al«o equal to about 

 three fourths of a second. This association-time he regards as a sort of 

 internal stj\ndard of duration to which we involuntarily as.similate all inter- 

 vals which we trj to reproduce, bringing shorter ones up to it and longer 

 ones down. [In the Stevens result we should have to say contrast instead 

 of assimilate, for tlie longer intervals there seem longer, and the shorter 

 ones shorter still.] " Singularly enough," he adds (Physiol. Psych., ii. 

 286), " this time is about that in which in rapid walking, according to the 

 Webers, our legs perform their swing. It seems thus not unlikely that 

 both psychical constants, that of the average speed of reproduction and that 

 of the surest estimation of time, have formed themselves under the influ- 

 ence of those most habitual movements of the body which we also use when 

 we try to subdivide rhythmically longer tracts of time." 



