640 PSYVIIOLOGY. 



the end is readied tlie beginning seems already to date from 

 indefinitely long ago. We enter a short street, and it is as 

 if we should never get to the end of it. This alteration 

 might conceivably result from an approach to the condition 

 of Von Bier's and Spencer's short-lived beings. If our dis- 

 crimination of successions became finer-grained, so that we 

 noted ten stages in a process where previously we only 

 noted one ; and if at the same time the processes faded ten 

 times as fast as before ; we might have a specious present 

 of the same subjective length as now, giving us the same 

 time-feeling and containing as many distinguishable suc- 

 cessive events, but out from the earlier end of it would 

 have dropped nine tenths of the real events it now contains. 

 They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merely 

 dated memories, reproducible at will. The beginning of 

 our sentences would have to be exjDressly recalled ; each 

 word would appear to pass through consciousness at a tenth 

 of its usual speed. The condition would, in short, be ex- 

 actly analogous to the enlargement of space by a micro- 

 scope ; fewer real things at once in the immediate field of 

 view, but each of them taking up more than its normal 

 room, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally far 

 away. 



Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly 

 without the compensating increase in the subdivisibility of 

 successions. Here the apparent length of the specious 

 present contracts. Consciousness dwindles to a point, and 

 loses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of its 

 path. Express acts of memory replace rapid bird's-eye 

 views. In my own case, something like this occurs in ex- 

 treme fatigue. Long illnesses produce it. Occasionally, it 

 appears to accompany aphasia.* It would be vain to seek 



*"The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than a 

 moment. His memory is as short for sounds, letters, figures, and printed 

 words. If we cover a written or printed word with a sheet of paper in 

 which a little window has been cut, so that only the first letter is visible 

 through the window, he pronounces this letter. If, then, the sheet is 

 moved so as to cover the tirst letter and make the second one visible, he pro- 

 nounces the second, but forgets the first, and cannot pronounce the first 

 and second together." And so forth to the end. "If he closes his eyes and 

 draws his finger exploriqgly over a well-known object like a knife or key. 



