MEMORY, 647 



brought back ; it never was lost ; its date was never cut 

 off in consciousness from that of the immecTiatelj present 

 moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the rear- 

 ward portion of the present space of time, and not to the 

 genuine past. In the last chapter we saw that the poj'- 

 tion of time which we directly intuit has a breadth of 

 several seconds, a rearward and a forward end, and may be 

 called the specious present. All stimuli whose first nerve- 

 vibrations have not jet ceased seem to be conditions of 

 our getting this feeling of the specious present. They give 

 rise to objects which appear to the mind as events just 

 past.* 



When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus for 

 many minutes or hours, a nervous process is set up which 

 results in the haunting of consciousness by the impression 

 for a long time afterwards. The tactile and muscular feel- 

 ings of a day of skating or riding, after long disuse oi 

 the exercise, will come back to us all through the night. 

 Images of the field of view of the microscoj^e Avill annoy 

 the observer for hours after an unusually long sitting at the 

 instrument. A thread tied around the finger, an unusual 

 constriction in the clothing, will feel as if still there, long 

 after they have been removed. These revivals (called phe- 

 nomena of Sinnesgeddchtniss by the Germans) have some- 

 thing periodical in their nature.f They show that profound 

 rearrangements and slow settlings into a new equilibrium 

 are going on in the neural substance, and they form the 

 transition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon oi 

 memory, of which the rest of this chapter must treat. The 



* Richet says : " The present has a certain duration, a variable duration, 

 sometimes a rather long one, which comprehends all the time occupied by 

 the after-reverberation [retentissement, after-imagej of a sensation. For ex- 

 ample, if the reverberation of an electric shock within our nerves lasts 

 ten minutes, for that electric shock there is a present of ten minutes. On 

 the other hand, a feebler sensation will have a shorter present. But in 

 every case, for a conscious sensation [1 should say for a remembered sensa- 

 tion] to occur, there must be a present of a certain duration, of a few sec- 

 onds at least." We have seen in the last chapter that it is hard to trace the 

 backward limits of this immediately intuited duration, or specious present. 

 The figures which M. Richet supposes appear to be considerably too large 



+ Cf. Fechner, Psychophysik, ir. 499. 



