"The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which he had in view on the day of his leaving the village rises now in his mind as its image lies before him.And with it -- in rapid succession and violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections -- arise massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life.They roll and wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year, then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, the first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and he reels with the fulness of his vision....Then the inner eye turns away from all this past.
The outer one turns to the village, especially to the church-tower.The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone.The one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so unchanged, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come between."
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.
"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount.Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century.Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour."
So writes Prof.Paul Janet, and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery.There is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself.A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10
of his whole life -- a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.This formula roughly expresses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view.In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out.But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
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.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 tædium is a protest , says Volkmann, against the entire present.
Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space.
A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way.
A space we measure by pacing appears longer than one we traverse with no thought of its length.And in general an amount of space attended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spaciousness than one of which we only note the content.
I do not say that everything in these fluctuations of estimate can be accounted for by the time's content being crowded and interesting, or simple and tame.Both in the shortening of time by old age and in its lengthening by ennui some deeper cause may be at work.This cause can only be ascertained, if it exist, by finding out why we perceive time at all.To this inquiry let us, though without much hope, proceed.THE FEELING OF PAST TIME IS A PRESENT FEELING.
If asked why we perceive the light of the sun, or the sound of an explosion, we reply, "Because certain outer forces, ether-waves or air-waves, smite upon the brain, awakening therein changes, to which the conscious perceptions, light and sound, respond." But we hasten to add that neither light nor sound copy or mirror the ether- or air-waves; they represent them only symbolically.The only case, says Helmholtz, in which such copying occurs, and in which
