I observed that this retrospective appreciation of time depended on the
degree of connection between the successive experiences. This condition
is very much the same as the other just given, namely, the degree of
uniformity of the experiences, since the more closely the successive
stages of the experience are connected--as when, for example, we are
going through our daily routine of work--the more quiet and unexciting
will be the transition from each stage to its succeeding one. And on the
other hand, all novelty of impression and exciting transition of
experience clearly involves a want of connection. Wundt thinks the
retrospective estimate of a connected series of experiences, such as
those of our daily round of occupations, is defective just because the
effort of attention, which precedes even an imaginative reproduction of
an impression, so quickly accommodates itself in this case to each of
the successive steps, whereas, when the experiences to be recalled are
disconnected, the effort requires more time. In this way, the estimate
of a past duration would be coloured by the sense of time accompanying
the reproductive process itself. This may very likely be the case, yet I
should be disposed to attach most importance to the number of
distinguishable items of experience recalled.
Our representation of the position of a given event in the past is, as I
have tried to show, determined by the movement of imagination in going
back to it from the present. And this is the same thing as to say that
it depends on our retrospective sense of the intervening space. That is
to say, the sense of distance in time, as in space, is the recognition
of a term to a movement. And just as the distance of an object will seem
greater when there are many intervening objects affording points of
measurement, than when there are none (as on the uniform surface of the
sea), so the distance of an event will vary with the number of
recognized intervening points.
The appreciation of the distance of an event in time does not, however,
wholly depend on the character of this movement of imagination. Just as
the apparent distance of a visible object depends _inter alia_ on the
distinctness of the retinal impression, so the apparent temporal
remoteness of a past event depends in part on the degree of intensity
and clearness of the mnemonic image. This is seen even in the case of
those images which we are able distinctly to localize in the
time-perspective. For a series of exciting experiences intervening
between the present and a past event appears not only _directly_ to add
to our sense of distance by constituting an apparently long interval,
but _indirectly_ to add to it by giving an unusual degree of faintness
to the recalled image. An event preceding some unusually stirring series
of experiences gets thrust out of consciousness by the very engrossing
nature of the new experiences, and so tends to grow more faint and
ghost-like than it would otherwise have done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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