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, and 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 tedium is a _protest_, says Volkmann, against the entire present. =The feeling of past time is a present feeling.= In reflecting on the _modus operandi_ of our consciousness of time, we are at first tempted to suppose it the easiest thing in the world to understand. Our inner states succeed each other. They know themselves as they are; then of course, we say, they must know their own succession. But this philosophy is too crude; for between the mind's own changes _being_ successive, and _knowing their own succession_, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. _A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation_, which this talk about the feelings knowing their time-relations as a matter of course leaves all untouched.