Well, just so, the sense in which b, as successor of ɑ, is such, in the series of events in question, that ɑ is over and gone when b comes, is not the sense in which ɑ and b are together elements in the whole experienced succession. But that, in both of these senses, the relation of b to its predecessor ɑ is an experienced fact, is a truth that any one can observe for himself.
If I utter a line of verse, such as
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,”
the sound of the word day succeeds the sound of the word parting, and I unquestionably experience the fact that, for me, every earlier word of the line is over and past before the succeeding word or the last word, day, comes to be uttered or to be heard. Yet this is unquestionably not my whole consciousness about the succession. For I am certainly also aware that the whole line of poetry, as a succession of uttered sounds (or, at all events, a considerable portion of the line), is present to me at once, and as this one succession, when I speak the line. For only by virtue of experiencing this wholeness do I observe the rhythm, the music, and the meaning of the line. The sense in which the word parting is over before the word day comes, is like the sense in which one object in space is where any other object is not, so that the spatial presence of one object excludes the presence of another at that same part of space. Precisely so the presence of the word day excludes the presence of the word parting from its own place in the temporal succession. And, in our experience of succession, each element is
present in a particular point of the series, in so far as, with
