The _effects of interested attention and volition_ remain. These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements and, by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their associates the only ones which are evoked. _This_ is the point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if anywhere, make its stand in dealing with association. Everything else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My own opinion on the question of active attention and spiritual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere (see p. 237). But even though there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not create ideas or summon them _ex abrupto_. Its power is limited to _selecting_ amongst those which the associative machinery introduces. If it can emphasize, reinforce, or protract for half a second either one of these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will need demand; for it then decides the direction of the _next_ associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized term; and determining in this wise the course of the man's thinking, it also determines his acts. CHAPTER XVII. THE SENSE OF TIME. =The sensible present has duration.= Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the _present_ moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson, says, "Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi," and it is only as entering into the living and moving organization of a much wider tract of time that the strict present is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philosophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion that it _must_ exist, but that it _does_ exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience. The only fact of our immediate experience is what has been well called 'the specious' present, a sort of saddle-back of time with a certain length of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a _duration_, with a bow and a stern, as it were--a rearward-and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this _duration-block_ that the relation of _succession_ of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.