Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/237

TIME AS BELATED TO CAUSALITY AND TO SPACE. 223 (c) The Psychology of the Time-Consciousness. This doctrine of the nature of time, like every philosophical theory, must meet the test of correspondence with admitted facts of consciousness. Now the essential of one's conscious- ness of time that which cannot be lacking, if there is to be time-consciousness at all is the awareness of more-than- one, that is of multiplicity, but of a successive multiplicity distinct from the manifold of the compound or of the ex- tended. When this realisation of multiplicity is absent, when one is absorbed in a topic of thought, or in a circum- scribed portion of one's surroundings, then one is lost to the sense of time ; but when one wakes up to the fact of change, when one compares this image or object with another, then the consciousness of time reappears. The temporality of the event thus includes its attribute of being one-of-many, and though every moment always is a filled moment, neverthe- less one may abstract from its colour or sound or fragrance and attend merely to its temporalness. Thus psychological introspection verifies the metaphysical doctrine of time as an unconcrete, successive manifold. The emptiness of the time-manifold suggests also an explana- tion of the length of uneventful periods of time ; the fewer the interesting events, the greater our attention to the bare fact of multiplicity as such. Similarly, the observation that uninteresting and habitual contents of consciousness notably breathings and muscular contractions form the measure of time-intervals l is a case in which the material of consciousness, itself uninteresting, leaves the attention free to direct itself to the fact of succession. "Awareness of change" is thus, as Prof. James says, "the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends." 2 But introspection reveals also that the time-consciousness is far more than the awareness of unordered multiplicity, and that rather, as Hoffding states the truth in his admirable exposition, 3 "inner connexion" as well as "change, transi- tion and alternation " is an element of the time-consciousness. Of this inner connexion, psychological theory has taken little account, and for this reason modern discussions of time are peculiarly futile and inconclusive. ' Past,' ' present ' and 'future' are distinctions of the moments according to lr rhis is sometimes incorrectly interpreted as the observation that breathings and movements form the material of the time-consciousness. 2 Principles of Psychology, i., p. 620. 3 Outlines of Psychology, p. 184.