Psychology · William James
THE SENSE OF TIME.
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 symbolic. To realize even an hour, we must count 'now! now! now! now!' indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feeling of a separate _bit_ 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 shortest interval_ which we can feel as time at all would seem to be 1/500 of a second. That is, Exner recognized two electric sparks to be successive when the second followed the first at that interval.
It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show that the latter alternative is the true one, and that _we can no more perceive a duration than we can perceive an extension, 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 Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness. Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words 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 sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused. The change must be of some concrete sort.
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. No one has anything like a _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 _multitudinous_ 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 time-_intuition_ in these cases at all. It is but dates and events representing 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 pass naturally to speak of certain familiar variations in our estimation of lengths of time. _In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short._ A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness yields hardly more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends 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 seems shorter 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 probably 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 multitude 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. _Tædium_, _ennui_, _Langweile_, _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 new impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself. Close your eyes and simply wait 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 overcome many such periods in its course. All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time _per se_, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision. The _odiousness_ of the whole experience comes from its insipidity; for _stimulation_ is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have. The sensation of tedium is a _protest_, says Volkmann, against the entire present.
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 we saw a while ago that our maximum distinct _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 duration is pictured fairly steadily in each passing instant of consciousness_ by virtue of some fairly constant feature in the brain-process to which the consciousness is tied. _This feature of the brain-process, whatever it be, must be 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 dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward 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 waterfall, 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 reproduction of an event, _after_ it has once completely dropped out of the rearward end of the specious present, is an entirely different psychic fact from its direct perception in the specious present as a thing immediately past. A creature 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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.