THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 641 



to imagine the exact brain-change in any of these cases. 

 But we must admit the possibility that to some extent the 

 variations of time-estimate between youth and age, and ex- 

 citement and ennui, are due to such causes, more immedi- 

 ate than to the one we assigned some time ago. 



But ivhether our feeling of the time ivhich immediately -past * 

 events have filled be of something long or of something short, it 

 is not ivhat it is because those events are past, but because they 

 hxxve left behind them processes which are present. To those pro- 

 cesses, however caused, the mind ivould still respond by feeling a 

 specious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished 

 into the past. As the Creator is supposed to have made 

 Adam with a navel — sign of a birth which never occurred — 

 so He might instantaneously make a man with a brain in 

 which were processes just like the ' fading ' ones of an ordi- 

 nary brain. The first real stimulus after creation would set 

 up a process additional to these. The processes would over- 

 lap ; and the new-created man would unquestionably have 

 the feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of havi^^ 

 been in existence already some little space of time. 



he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. But 

 if it is put into his hand so that he can simultaneously touch it with several 

 lingers, he names it without difficulty. This patient has thus lost the ca- 

 pacity for grouping successive . . . impressions . . . into a whole and per- 

 ceiving them as a whole." (Grashey, in Archiv filr Psychiatric, Bd. xvi. 

 pp. 673-673.) It is hard to believe that in such a patient the time intuited 

 was not clipped off like the impressions it held, though perhaps not so much 

 of it. 



I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of time-perspective at 

 the moment of a falling asleep. A person will be moving or doing some- 

 thing in the room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be) will be 

 my last waking perception. Then a subsequent stage will wake me to a new 

 perception. The two stages of the act will not be more than a few seconds 

 apart ; and yet it always seems to me as if, between the earlier and the later 

 one, a long interval has passed away. I conjecturally account for the 

 phenomenon thus, calling the two stages of the act a and b respectively ; 

 Were I awake, a would leave a fading process in my sensorium which 

 would overlap the process of b when the latter came, and both would then 

 appear in the same specious present, a belonging to its earlier end. But 

 the sudden advent of the brain-change called sleep extinguishes a's fading 

 process abruptly. When b then comes and wakes me, a comes back, it ia 

 true, but not as belonging to the specious present. It has to be specially 

 revoked in memory. This mode of revocation usually characterizes long- 

 past things — whence the illusion. 



* Again I omit the future, merely for simplicity's .sake. 



