THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 639 



We have every reason to think that creatures may possi- 

 bly difler enormously in the amounts of duration which they 

 intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may 

 fill it. Von Baer has indulged* in some interesting compu- 

 tations of the effect of such differences in changing the 

 aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length 

 of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 

 10, as now ; if our life were then destined to hold the same 

 number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We 

 should live less than a month, and personally know nothing 

 of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe 

 in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carbonifer- 

 ous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow 

 to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would 

 stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, 

 and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppt se a 

 being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that 

 we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 times 

 as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters 

 of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will 

 shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous 

 creations ; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth 

 like restlessly boiling- water springs ; the motions of animals 

 will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets 

 and cannon-balls ; the sun will scour through the sky like 

 a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such 

 imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may 

 be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be 

 rash to deny. 



"A gnat's wings," says Mr. Spencer,1 " make ten or fifteen thousand 

 strokes a second. Each stroke implies a separate nervous action. Each 

 sucn nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as ap- 

 preciable by the gnat as is a quick movement of his arm by a man. 

 And if this, or anything like this, is the fact, then the time occupied by 

 a given external change, measured by many movements in the one 

 case, must seem much longer than in the other case, when measured 

 by one movement." 



In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the 

 apparent time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere 



*Redeii(St. Petersburg, 1864), vol i pp. :-55-268. 

 t Psychology, § 91. 



