638 PSYCHOLOGY. 



cesses of different phase — wherever and from whatever 

 cause it may occur. 



To pass, now, to conceptual processes : Suppose I think 

 of the Creation, then of the Christian era, then of the battle 

 of Waterloo, all within a few seconds. These matters have 

 their dates far outside the specious present. The pro- 

 cesses by which I think them, however, all overlap. What 

 events, then, does the specious present seem to contain ? 

 Simply my successive acts of thinking these long-past 

 things, not the long-past things themselves. As the in- 

 stantly-present thought may be of a long-past thing, so the 

 just-past thought may be of another long-past thing. When 

 a long-past event is reproduced in memory and conceived 

 with its date, the reproduction and conceiving traverse the 

 specious present. The immediate content of the latter is 

 thus all my direct experiences, whether subjective or ob- 

 jective. Some of these meanwhile may be representative of 

 other experiences indefinitely remote. 



The number of these direct experiences which the 

 specious present and immediately-intuited past may em- 

 brace measures the extent of our ' jjrimary,' as Exner calls 

 it, or, as Kichet calls it, of our ' elementary ' memory.* The 

 sensation resultant from the overlapping is that of the 

 duration which the experiences seem to fill. As is the num- 

 ber of any larger set of events to ihat of these experiences, 

 so w^e suppose is the length of that duration to this duration. 

 But of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing 

 sense.' The variations in our appreciation of the same 

 amount of real time may possibly be explained by altera- 

 tions in the rate of fading in the images, producing changes 

 in the complication of superposed processes, to which 

 changes changed states of consciousness may correspond. 

 But however long ivemay conceive a space of time to be, the 

 objective amount of it which is directly perceived at any one 

 moment by us can never exceed the scoj)e of our 'primary 

 memory ' at the moment in question. f 



* Exner in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. ii. Thl. n. p. 281. 

 Richet in Revue Philosophique, xxi. 568 (juin, 1886). See the next chap- 

 ter, pp. 64-2-646. 



f I have spoken of /rtf^^ngr brain- processes alone, but only for simplicity's 

 sake. Daioning processes probably play as important a part in giving the 

 feeling of duration to the specious present. 



