gram. Call the forgotten thing Z, the first facts with
which we felt it was related a, b, and c, and the details
finally operative in calling it up I, m, and n. Each circle
will then stand for the brain-process principally concerned
in the thought of the fact lettered within it. The activity
in Z will at first be a mere tension ; but as the activities in
a, b, and c little by little irradiate into I, m, and n, and aa
ASSOCIATION. 275
ill these processes are somehow connected with Z, their
combined irradiations upon Z, represented by the centripe-
tal arrows, succeed in rousing Z also to full activity.
Turn now to the case of finding the unknown means to
a distinctly conceived end. The end here stands in the
place of a, h, r, in the diagram. It is the starting-point of
:he irradiations of suggestion : and here, as in that case,
what the voluntary attention (iocs is only to dismiss some
of the suggestions as irrelevant, and hold fast to others
which are felt to be more pertinent — let these be symbol-
ized by I, in, n. These latter at last accumulate sufficiently
to discharge all together into Z, the excitement of which
process is, in the mental sphere, equivalent to the solution
of our problem. The only difference between this and
the previous case is that in this one there need be no orig-
inal sub-excitement in Z, cooperating from the very first.
In the solving of a problem, all that we are aware of in
advance seems to be its relations. It must be a cause, or
it must be an effect, or it must contain an attribute, or
it must be a means, or what not. We know, in short, a
lot about it, whilst as yet we have no acquaintance with it.
Our perception that one of the objects which turn up is,
at last, our qucEsitum, is due to our recognition that its re-
lations are identical with those we had in mind, and this
may be a rather slow act of judgment. Every one knows
that an object may be for some time present to his mind
before its relations to other matters are perceived. Just so
the relations may be there before the object is.
From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plotting
of the policy of an em])ire there is no other process than
this. We must trust to the laws of cerebral nature to
present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea, but M-e
must know H for the right one when it comes.
It is foreign to my purpose here to enter into any
detailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit.
In a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an example
M can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of which
276 PSTCnOLOGT.
he seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which he
seeks tlie proof. In either case he keeps turning the
matter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of asso-
ciate upon associate, some habitual, some similar, one arises
which he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, may
take years. No rules can be given by which the investi-
gator may proceed straight to his result; but both here
and in the case of reminiscence the accumulation of helps
in the way of associations may advance more rapidly by
the use of certain routine methods. In striving to recall a
thought, for example, we may of set purpose run through
the successive classes of circumstance with which it may
possibly have been connected, trusting that when the right
member of the class has turned up it will help the thought's
revival. Thus we may run through all the places in which
we may have had it. We may run through the persons
whom we remember to have conversed with, or we may call
up successively all the hooks we have lately been reading.
If we are trying to remember a person we may run through
a list of streets or of professions. Some item out of the
lists thus methodically gone over will very likely be asso-
ciated with the fact we are in need of, and may suggest it
or help to do so. And yet the item might never have arisen
without such systematic procedure. In scientific research
this accumulation of associates has been methodized by
Mill under the title of ' The Four Methods of Experi-
mental Inquiry.' By the ' method of agreement,' by that
of 'difference,' by those of 'residues' and 'concomitant
variations ' (which cannot here be more nearly defined), we
make certain lists of cases; and by ruminating these lists
in our minds the cause we seek will be more likely to
emerge. But the final stroke of discovery is only prepared,
not effected, by them. The brain-tracts must, of their own
accord, shoot the right way at last, or we shall still grope
in darkness. That in some brains the tracts do shoot the
right way much oftener than in others, and that we cannot
:tell why, — these are ultimate facts to which we must never
ASSOCIATION. 277
close our eyes. Even in forming our lists of instances
according to Mill's methods, we are at the mercy of the
spontaneous workings of Similarity in our brain. How
are a number of facts, resembling the one whose cause we
seek, to be brought together in a list unless one will rapidly
suggest another through association by similarity?
Similarity no Elementary Law. — Such is the analysis I
propose, first of the three main types of spontaneous, and
then of voluntary, trains of thought. It will be observed
that the object called up may bear a/iij logical relation
whatever to the one which suggested if. The law requires
only that one condition should be fulfilled. The fading
object must be due to a brain-process some of whose ele-
ments awaken through habit some of the elements of the
brain-process of the object which comes to view. This
awakening is the causal agency in the kind of association
called Similarity, as in any other sort. The similarity
itself betvreen the objects has no causal agency in carry-
ing us from one to the other. It is but a result — the effect
of the usual causal agent when this happens to Avork in a
certain way. Ordinary writers talk as if the similarity of
the objects were itself an agent, coordinate with habit, and
independent of it, and like it able to push objects before
the mind. This is quite unintelligible. The similarity of
two things does not exist till both t'.lngs are there — it is
meaningless to talk of it as an agent of production of any-
thing, whether in the physical or the psychical realms. It
is a relation which the mind perceives after the fact, just
as it may perceive the relations of superiority, of distance,
of causality, of container and content, of substance and
accident, or of contrast, between an object and some second
object which the associative machinery calls up.
Conclusion. — To sum u]), then, we see that the difference
beticcrn the three kinds of association reduces itself to a
simple difference in the amount (f th<it jiortion of the
nerve-tract supporting the going thought which is oper-
ative in calling up the thought which comes. But the
278 P3T0H0L0OT.
modus operandi of this active part is the same, be it large
or be it small. The items constituting the coming object
waken in every instance because their nerve-tracts once
were excited continuously with those of the going object
or its operative part. This ultimate pliysiological law of
habit among the neural elements is what runs the train.
The direction of its course and the form of its transitions
are due to the unknown conditions by which in some
brains action tends to focalize itself in small spots, while
in others it fills patiently its broad bed. What these dif-
fering conditions are, it seems impossible to guess. What-
ever they are, they are what separate the man of genius
from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking.
In the chapter on Reasoning we shall need to recur again
to this point. _ I trust that the student will now feel
that the way to a deeper understanding of the order of our
ideas lies in the direction of cerebral physiology. The
elementary process of revival can be nothing but the law
of habit. Truly the day is distant when physiologists
shall actually trace from cell-group to cell-group the
irradiations which we have hypothetically invoked. Prob-
ably it will never arrive. The schematism we have used
is, moreover, taken immediately from the analysis of
objects into their elementary parts, and only extended by
analogy to the brain. And yet it is only as incorporated
in the brain that such a schematism can represent any-
thing causal. This is, to my mind, the conclusive reason
for saying that the order of presentation of the mind's
materials is due to cerebral physiology alone.
The law of accidental prepotency of certain processes
over others falls also within the sphere of cerebral proba-
bilities. Granting such instability as the brain-tissue re-
quires, certain points must always discharge more quickly
and strongly than others; and this prepotency would shift
its place from moment to moment by accidental causes,
giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capriciou.9
ASSOCIATION. 279
play of similar association in the most gifted mind. A
study of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundance
of paths of irradiation seems, in the dormant brain, reduced.
A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequences
occur because the currents run — Mike sparks in burnt-up
paper ' — wherever the nutrition of the moment creates an
opening, but nowliere else.
The effects of interested attention and volition remain.
These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements and,
by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their
associates the only ones which are evoked. 'This is the
point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if any-
where, make its stand in dealing with association. Every-
thing else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My
own opinion on the question of active attention and spirit-
ual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere (see p. 237). But
even though there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly
not create ideas or summon them ex ahrupto. Its power is
limited to selecting amongst those which the associative
machinery introduces. If it can emphasize, reinforce, or
protract for half a second either one of these, it can do all
that the most eager advocate of free will need demand ; for
it then decides the direction of the next associations by
making them hinge upon the emphasized term; and deter-
mining in this wise the course of the man's thinking, it
ftlso determines his acts.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SENSE OF TIME.
The sensible present has duration. Let any one try, I
will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present
moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences
occurs. Where is it, this present ? It has melted in our
grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of
becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson, says,
" Le moment ou je parle est deja loin de moi,"
and it is only as entering into the living and moving organi-
zation of a much wider tract of time that the strict present
is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal
abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably
never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philo-
sophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion
that it m^ist exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact
of our immediate experience. The only fact of our imme-
diate experience is what has been well called ' the specious '
present, a sort of saddle-back of time with a certain length
of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we
look in two directions into time. The unit of composi-
tion of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow
and a stern, as it were — a rearward- and a forward-looking
end. It is only as parts of this duration-hlock that the
relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived.
We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after
it, and from the perception of the succession infer an
interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval
of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. Tho
experience is from the outset a synthetic datum^ not a
THE SENSE OF THTE. 281
simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are
inseparable, although attention looking back may easily
decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning
from its end.
The moment we pass beyond a very few seconds our
consciousness of duration ceases to be an immediate
perception and becomes a construction more or less sym-
bolic. To realize even an hour, we must count 'now!
now I now I now I' indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feel-
ing of a separate bii of time, and the exact sum of the
bits never makes a clear impression on our mind. The
longest bit of duration which we can apprehend at once so
as to discriminate it from longer and shorter bits of time
would seem (from experiments made for another purpose
in Wundt's laboratory) to be about 12 seconds. The
sliortest interval which we can feel as time at all would
seem to be -5^ of a second. That is, Exner recognized
two electric sparks to be successive when the second fol-
lowed the first at that interval.
We have no sense for empty time. Let one sit with
closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world,
attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one who
wakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the
middle of the night, and all things moving to a day of
doom." There seems under such circumstances as these
no variety in the material content of our thought, and
what we notice appears, if anything, to be the pure series
of durations budding, as it were, and growing beneath our
indrawn gaze. Is this really so or not ? The question is
important; for, if the experience be what it roughly seems,
we have a sort of special sense for pure time — a sense to
which empty duration is an adequate stimulus; while if it
be an illusion, it must be that our perception of time's
flight, in the experiences quoted, is duo to the filing of
the time, and to our memory of a content which it had a
moment previous, and which we feel to agree or disagree
with itg content now.
282 PSYCHOLOGY.
It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show
that the latter alternative is the true one, and that zve can
no more perceive a duration than we can perceive an exten-
sion, devoid of all sensible content. Just as with closed
eyes we see a dark visual field in which a curdling play of
obscurest luminosity is always going on; so, be we never
so abstracted from distinct outward impressions, we are
always inwardly immersed in what AVundt has somewhere
called the twilight of our general consciousness. Our
heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention,
fragments of Avords or sentences that pass through our
imagination, are what people this dim habitat. Now, all
these processes are rhythmical, and are apprehended by
us, as they occur, in their totality; the breathing and
pulses of attention, as coherent successions, each with its
rise and fall; the heart-beats similarly, only relatively far
more brief; the words not separately, but in connected
groups. In short, empty our minds as we may, some form
of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be
expelled. And along with the sense of the process and
its rhythm goes the sense of the length of time it lasts.
Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our
perception of time's flow depends; but there exists no
reason to suppose that empty time's own changes are suffi-
cient for the awareness of change to be aroused. Th"
change must be of some concrete sort.
Appreciation of Longer Durations. — In the experience of
watching empty time flow — ' empty ' to be taken hereafter
in the relative sense just set forth — we tell it off in pulses.
We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more!
more!' as we feel it bud. This composition out of units
of duration is called the law of time's discrete flow. The
discreteness is, however, merely due to the fact that our
successive acts of recognition or apjjerceptioji of ivhat it is
are discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sen-
sation can be. All continuous sensations are 7iamed in
beats. We notice that a certain finite ' more ' of them is
THE SENSE OF TIME. 283
passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson's image, the
sensation is the nieasuriug-tape, the perception the divid-
ing-engine which stamps its length. As we listen to a
steady sound, we take it in in discrete pulses of recog-
nition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the
samel ' The case stands no otherwise with time.
After a small number of beats our impression of the
amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only
way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing
the clock, or through some other symbolic conception.
When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is
absolutely symbolic. "We think of the amount we mean
either solely as a name, or by running over a few salient
dates therein, with no pretence of imagining the full
durations that lie between them. Xo one has anything
like SL perception of the greater length of the time between
now and the first century than of that between now and
the tenth. To an historian, it is true, the longer interval
will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so
appear a more mult it iidi nous thing. And for the same
reason most people will think they directly perceive the
length of the past fortnight to exceed that of the past
week. But there is properly no comparative i\m.Q-intui-
tion in these cases at all. It is but dates and events rep-
resenting time, their abundance symbolizing its length.
I am sure that this is so, even where the times compared
are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same
with spaces of many miles, which we always compare with
each other by the numbers that measure them.
From this we jiass naturally to speak of certain familiar
variations in our estimation of lengths of time. J)i general,
a time Jilhil iritli varied and interesting experiences seems
short in juissing, but long as we look hack. On the other
hand, a tract of time emjdg of experiences seems long in
passing, hut in retrospect short. A week of travel and
eight-seeing may suljtcnd an angle more like three weeks
in the memory; and a montii of sickness yields hardly
284 PSYCHOLOOr.
more memories than a day. The length in retrospect de-
pends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories
which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes,
many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look
back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel
up.
The same space of time seeins sliorter as we grow older —
that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether
the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds
to all appearance remain about the same. An old man
jirobably does not feel his past life to be any longer than
he did when he was a boy, though it may be a dozen times
as long. In most men all the events of manhood's years
are of such familiar sorts that the individual impressions
do not last. At the same time more and more of the earlier
events get forgotten, the result being that no greater mul-
titude of distinct objects remains in the memory.
So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in
retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so
fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual
time itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is
said to pass ' ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full
of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a
small eternity. Tcedium, ennui, Langioeile, boredom, are
words for which, probably, every language known to man
has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the
relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow
attentive to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and
being ready for, a iieyf impression to succeed; when it fails
to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such ex-
periences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably
aware of the extent of the mere time itself. Close your
eyes and simply Avait to hear somebody tell you that a
minute has elapsed, and the full length of your leisure with
it seems incredible. You engulf yourself into its bowels
as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean
voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have
77?:^ SEXSE OF TTME. 285
OTeroome many such periods in its course. All because
vou attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time />cr sr,
and because your attention to that is susceptible of such
fine-grained successive subdivision. The odionsness of the
whole experience comes from its insipidity; for sfiinuJa-
tion is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an expe-
rience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating
experience we can have. The sensation of tedium is a
prof est, says Volkmann, against the entire present.
The feeling of past time is a present feeling. In reflect-
ing on the modus operandi of our consciousness of time,
we are at first tempted to suppose it the easiest thing in
the world to understand. Our inner states succeed each
other. They know themselves as they are; then of course,
we sav, thev must know their own succession. But this
philosophy is too crude; for between the mind's own
clianges being successive, and Jcnnioing iheir own succei^-
sinn, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and sub-
ject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession
of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession.
And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their
succession is added, that must he treated as an additional
fact requiring its own special elucidation, which this talk
about the feelings knowing their time-relations as a matter
of course leaves all untouched.
If we represent the actual time-stream of our tliinking
by an horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any
segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be
figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a
certain point. The length of this perpendicular stands for
a certain object or content, which in this case is th(> time
thought of at the actual moment of the stream ujxui which
the perpendicular is raised.
There is thus a sort of perspective projection of past
objects upon present consciousness, similar to that of wide
landscapes upon a camera-screen.
And since wc saw a while ago that our maximum dis-
286 PSTCHOL007.
iinct perception of duration hardly covers more than a dozen
seconds (while our maximum vague perception is probably
not more than that of a minute or so), we must suppose that
this amount of (hiration is pictured fairly steadily in each
passing instant of consciousness by virtue of some fairly
constant feature in the brain-process to which the con-
sciousness is tied. This feature of the brain-jn-ocess, what-
ever it he, must he the cause of our perceiving the fact of
time at all. The duration thus steadily perceived is hardly
more than the 'specious present/ as it was called a few
pages back. Its content is in a constant flux, events dawn-
ing into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rear-
ward one, and each of them changing its time-coefficient
from ' not yet,' or ' not quite yet,' to 'just gone,' or ' gone,' as
it passes by. Meanwhile, the specious present, the intuited
duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the water-
fall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that
stream through it. Each of these, as it slips out, retains
the power of being reproduced; and when reproduced, is
reproduced with the duration and neighbors which it
originally had. Please observe, however, that the repro-
duction of an event, after it has once completely dropped
out of the rearward end of the specious present, is an
entirely diflFerent psychic fact from its direct perception in
the specious present as a thing immediately past. A crea-
ture might be entirely devoid of reproductive memory, and
yet have the time-sense; but the latter would be limited,
in his case, to the few seconds immediately passing by. In
the next chapter, assuming the sense of time as given, we
will turn to the analysis of what happens in reproductive
memory, the recall of dated things.
CHAPTEE XVIII.
MEMORY.
Analysis of the Phenomenon of Memory. — ^lemory proper,
or Becondary memory as it might be styled, is the knowl-
edge of a former state of mind after it has already once
dropped from consciousness; or rather if i\s the knoivhdye
of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been