"A gnat's wings," says Mr Spencer, "make ten or fifteen thousand strokes a second.Each stroke implies a separate nervous action.Each such nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as appreciable by the gnat as is a quick movement of his arm by a man.And if this, or anything like this, is the fact, then the time occupied by a given external change, measured by many movements in the one case, must seem much longer than in the other case, when measured by one movement."
In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent time-perspective.We utter a sentence, and ere the end is reached the beginning seems already to date from indefinitely long ago.We enter a short street, and it is as if we should never get to the end of it.This alteration might conceivably result from an approach to the condition of Von Bær's and Spencer's short-lived beings.If our discrimination of successions became finer-grained, so that we noted ten stages in a process where previously we only noted one; and if at the same time the processes faded ten times as fast as before; we might have a specious present of the same subjective length as now, giving us the same time-feeling and containing as many distinguishable successive events, but out from the earlier end of it would have drooped nine tenths of the real events it now contains.They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merely dated memories, reproducible at will.The beginning of our sentences would have to be expressly recalled; each word would appear to pass through consciousness at a tenth of its usual speed.The condition would, in short, be exactly analogous to the enlargement of space by a microscope; fewer real things at once in the immediate field of view, but each of them taking up more than its normal room, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally far away.
Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly without the compensating increase in the subdivisibility of successions.Here the apparent length of the specious present contracts.Consciousness dwindles to a point, and loses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of its path.Express acts of memory replace rapid bird's-eye views.In my own case, something like this occurs in extreme fatigue.Long illnesses produce it.Occasionally, it appears to accompany aphasia. It would be vain to seek
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 excitement and ennui , are due to such causes, more immediate than to the one we assigned some time ago.
But whether our feeling of the time which immediately-past events have filled be of something long or of something short, it is not what it is because those events are past, but because they have left behind them processes which are present.To those processes, however caused, the mind would 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 ordinary brain.
The first real stimulus after creation would set up a process additional to these.The processes would overlap; and the new-created man would unquestionably have the feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of having been in existence already some little space of time.
Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration -- the specious present -- varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time.Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically.Kant's notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it.The cause of the intuition which we really have cannot be the duration of our brain-processes or our mental changes.That duration is rather the object of the intuition which, being realized at every moment of such duration, must be due to a permanently present cause.This cause -- probably the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phase-fluctuates; and hence a certain range of variation in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility, accrues.
Footnotes This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol.XX.p.374.
James Mill, Analysis, vol.I.p.319 (J.S.Mill's Edition).
"What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings..
..The simultaneous perception of both sub-feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence, is the total feeling -- the minimum of consciousness -- and this minimum has duration...Time-duration, however, is inseparable from the minimum, notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which part of it came first, which last....We do not require to know that the sub-feelings come in sequence, first one, then the other; nor to know what coming in sequence means.But we have, in any artificially isolated minimum of consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and latter in time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling that grows stronger, and the change between them....
