It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to
shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a
given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to
run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated
forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative
process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time
anticipated. Moreover, since in anticipation so much of each division of
the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant
imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely
remote events.
In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in
the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests
propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid anticipations, to whatever cause
the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part
of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination
and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.
It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the
imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the
present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for
commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that
there is a continually renewed contradiction between anticipation and
perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the attitude of
expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it
is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of
perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of
imagination.
When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the
apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the
intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective
estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will
seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the
intervening space, for in this case the imagination does not project the
experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.
Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any
duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is
exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting
experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new
experiences, appears to be boundless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account