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 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

Chapter 7

MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. ________ is a library of classes that do not replace ________, but provide an improved alternative for creating
GUI applications.
a. AWT, Swing
b. Swing, AWT
c. JFC, AWT
d. JFC, Swing

ANS: B

2. Programs that operate in a GUI environment must be

a. event driven
b. in color
c. dialog boxes
d. layout managers

ANS: A

3. In GUI terminology, a container that can be displayed as a window is known

as a _______________.
a. message dialog
b. buffer
c. Swing package
d. frame

ANS: D

4. To end an application, pass this as the argument to the JFrame class's setDefaultCloseOperation()
method.
a. END_ON_CLOSE
b. JFrame.END_ON_CLOSE
c. JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE
d. JFrame.CLOSE_NOT_HIDE

ANS: C

5. The minimize button, maximize button, and close button on a window are sometimes referred to as
a. operations buttons
b. sizing buttons
c. decorations
d. display buttons

ANS: C

6. To use the ActionListener interface, as well as other event listener interfaces, you must have the following
import statement in your code:
a. import java.swing;
b. import java.awt;
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

c. import java.awt.*;
d. import java.awt.event.*;

ANS: D

7. When you write an action listener class for a JButton component, it must
a. have a method named buttonClicked
b. implement the ActionLIstener interface
c. have a method named actionPerformed which must take an argument of the ActionEvent
type
d. Both b and c.

ANS: D

8. In a Swing application, you create a frame object from the

a. Jlabel class
b. JFrame class
c. Jpanel class
d. AbstractButton class

ANS: B

9. To use the Color class, which is used to set the foreground and background of various objects, use the
following import statement
a. import java.swing;
b. import java.awt;
c. import java.awt.*;
d. import java.awt.event.*;

ANS: C

10. This layout manager arranges components in rows.

a. GridLayout
b. BorderLayout
c. FlowLayout
d. RegionLayout

ANS: C

11. This layout manager arranges components in regions named North, South, East, West, and Center.
a. GridLayout
b. BorderLayout
c. FlowLayout
d. RegionLayout

ANS: B

12. If panel references a JPanel object, which of the following statements adds the GridLayout to it?
a. panel.setLayout(new (GridLayout(2,3));
b. panel.addLayout(new (GridLayout(2,3));
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

c. panel.GridLayout(2,3);
d. panel.attachLayout(GridLayout(2,3));

ANS: A

13. When using the BorderLayout manager, how many components can each region hold?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 5
d. No limit

ANS: A

14. The GridLayout manager limits each cell to only one component. To put two or more components in a cell,
do this.
a. Resize the cells so they can hold more
b. You can nest panels inside the cells, and add other components to the panels
c. The statement is false. The GridLayout manager does not have this restriction
d. Resize the components to fit in the cell

ANS: B

15. Which of the following statements is not true?

a. Radio buttons are round and check boxes are square.
b. Radio buttons are often grouped together and are mutually exclusive; Check boxes are not
c. Radio buttons and check boxes both implement the ActionListener interface
d. They are all true

ANS: C

16. How many radio buttons can be selected at the same time as the result of the following code?

hours = new JRadioButton("Hours");

minutes = new JRadioButton("Minutes");
seconds = new JRadioButton("Seconds");
days = new JRadioButton("Days");
months = new JRadioButton("Months");
years = new JRadioButton("Years");
timeOfDayButtonGroup = new ButtonGroup();
dateButtonGroup = new ButtonGroup();
timeOfDayButtonGroup.add(hours);
timeOfDayButtonGroup.add(minutes);
timeOfDayButtonGroup.add(seconds);
dateButtonGroup.add(days);
dateButtonGroup.add(months);
dateButtonGroup.add(years);

a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

ANS: B

17. Assume that radio references a JRadioButton object. To click the radio button in code, use the following
statement.
a. radio.Click();
b. Click(radio);
c. Click(radio, true);
d. radio.doClick();

ANS: D

18. The variable panel references a JPanel object. The variable bGroup references a ButtonGroup object,
which contains several button components. If you want to add the buttons to the panel...

a. use the statement, panel.add(bGroup);

b. use the statement, bGroup.add(panel);
c. use the statement, Panel panel = new Panel(bGroup);
d. add each button to panel one at a time, e.g. panel.add(button1);

ANS: D

19. What will be the result of executing the following statement?

panel.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLUE, 5));

a. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a blue line border that is 5 millimeters thick.
b. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a blue line border that is 5 pixels thick.
c. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a blue line border that is 5 characters thick.
d. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a blue line border that is 5 inches thick.

ANS: B

20. When an application uses many components, rather than deriving just one class from the JFrame class, it is
often better to encapsulate smaller groups of related components and their event listeners into their own class. A
commonly used technique to do this is:
a. To extend a class from the JAbstractButton class to contain other components and their
related code
b. To extend a class from the JComponent class to contain other components and their related code
c. To extend a class from the JPanel class to contain other components and their related code
d. To extend a class from the JFrame class to contain other components and their related code

ANS: C

21. To include Swing and AWT components in your program, use the following import statements
a. import java.swing; import java.awt;
b. import java.swing; import javax.awt;
c. import javax.swing; import java.awt;
d. import javax.swing; import javax.awt;

ANS: C
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

22. These types of components are coupled with their underlying peers.
a. Lightweight
b. Featherweight
c. Middleweight
d. Heavyweight

ANS: D

23. JFC stands for

a. Java Fundamental Classes
b. Java Foundation Classes
c. Java Fundamental Core
d. Java Frame Class

ANS: B

24. When this is the argument passed to the JFrame class's setDefaultCloseOperation() method, the
application is hidden, but not closed.
a. HIDE_ON_CLOSE
b. JFrame. HIDE_ON_CLOSE
c. JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE
d. JFrame.HIDE_NOT_CLOSE

ANS: B

25. This is a basic window that has a border around it, a title bar, and a set of buttons for minimizing, maximizing,
and closing the window.
a. Pane
b. Container
c. Frame
d. Dialog box

ANS: C

26. Which of the following statements creates a class that is extended from the JFrame class?
a. JFrame DerivedClass = new JFrame();
b. class JFrame DerivedClass;
c. JFrame(DerivedClass);
d. public class DerivedClass extends JFrame{}

ANS: D

27. What does the following statement do?

addButton.addActionListener(new AddButtonListener());

a. Creates an AddButtonListener object

b. Registers the addButton object as an ActionListener with the AddButtonListener
object
c. Creates an AddButtonListener object and registers the AddButtonListener object with
the addButton
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

d. Nothing, the statement is invalid

ANS: C

28. Event listeners must

a. implement an interface
b. be included in private inner classes
c. not receive any arguments
d. exit the application once it has handled the event

ANS: A

29. If button1 is a JButton object, which of the following statements will make its background blue?
a. button1.makeBackground(BLUE);
b. button1.setBackground(Color.BLUE);
c. button1.makeBackground(Color.BLUE);
d. button1.set.Background(BLUE);

ANS: B

30. This layout manager arranges components in five regions.

a. GridLayout
b. BorderLayout
c. FlowLayout
d. RegionLayout

ANS: B

31. Which of the following is not a rule for the FlowLayout manager?
a. Multiple components can be added to a container that uses a FlowLayout manager
b. New components will be added in a row from left to right
c. When there is no more room in a row, additional components are put on the next row
d. All of these are rules for the FlowLayout manager

ANS: D

32. When a component is added to a region in the BorderLayout manager,

a. the component retains its original size
b. it results in a compile time error, if it is too large
c. the component is stretched so it fills up the entire region
d. the region is resized to fit the component

ANS: C

33. When adding components to a container that is governed by the GridLayout manager,
a. you cannot specify a cell
b. you specify the cell with the row and column numbers in the add statement
c. you must add them starting with the lower, right cell
d. the components are added automatically by filling up the first column, then the second, etc.
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

ANS: A

34. Which of the following statements is not true?

a. Radio buttons are round and check boxes are square.
b. Radio buttons are often grouped together and are mutually exclusive; Check boxes are not
c. Radio buttons implement ActionListener; Check boxes implement ItemListener
d. All of these are true

ANS: D

35. Why doesn't the following code compile correctly?

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class ColorCheckBoxWindow extends JFrame
{
private JCheckBox greenCheckBox;
private final int WINDOW_WIDTH = 300, WINDOW_HEIGHT = 100;
public ColorCheckBoxWindow()
{
setTitle("Green Check Box");
setSize(WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT);
setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
greenCheckBox = new JCheckBox("Green");
greenCheckBox.addItemListener(new CheckBoxListener());
setLayout(new FlowLayout());
add(greenCheckBox);
setVisible(true);
}
public void itemStateChanged(ItemEvent e)
{
if (e.getSource() == greenCheckBox)
{
System.exit(0);
}
}
}
a. ColorCheckBoxWindow is not implementing the correct listener
b. The button cannot be added to the content pane
c. The itemStateChanged method cannot be coded here
d. greenCheckBox should not be a private member

ANS: C

36. Assume that the variable checkbox references a JCheckBox object. To determine whether the check box has
been selected, use the following code.
a. if (isSelected(checkBox)) {/*code to execute, if selected*/}
b. if (checkBox.isSelected()) {/*code to execute, if selected*/}
c. if (checkBox) {/*code to execute, if selected*/}
d. if (checkBox.doClick()) {/*code to execute, if selected*/}

ANS: B
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

37. What will be the result of executing the following statement?

panel.setBorder(BorderFactory.createTitleBorder("Title"));

a. The JPanel referenced by panel will have an etched border with the title "Title" displayed on it.
b. The JPanel referenced by panel will have an empty border with the title "Title" displayed on it.
c. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a line border with the title "Title" displayed on it.
d. The JPanel referenced by panel will have a compound border with the title "Title" displayed on
it.

ANS: A

38. When an application uses many components, instead of extending just one class from the JFrame class, a better
approach is to
a. break the application into several smaller applications
b. reconsider the design of the application
c. encapsulate smaller groups of related components and their event listeners into their own classes
d. just go ahead and do it in one large class

ANS: C

39. This is a graphic image that is displayed while an application loads into memory and starts up.
a. The Java 6 trademark screen
b. Memory usage screen
c. Blue screen of death
d. Splash screen

ANS: D

40. You would use this command at the operating system command line to execute the code in the
MyApplication class and display the graphic image Logo.jpg as a splash screen.
a. java MyApplication Logo.jpg
b. java -splash:Logo.jpg MyApplication
c. java MyApplication –splash
d. java Logo.jpg –splash:MyApplication

ANS: B

TRUE/FALSE

1. A GUI program automatically stops executing when the end of the main method is reached.

ANS: F

2. A common technique for writing an event listener class is to write it as a private inner class inside the class that
creates the GUI.

ANS: T
 Gaddis: Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures, 2/e © 2012 Pearson Education

3. The following statement adds the FlowLayout manager to the container, centers the components, and
separates the components with a gap of 10 pixels.

setLayout(new FlowLayout());

ANS: F

4. Check boxes may be grouped in a ButtonGroup like radio buttons are.

ANS: T

5. The System.exit method will end the application.

ANS: T

6. The ActionEvent argument that is passed to an action listener's actionPerformed method is the event
object that was generated in response to an event.

ANS: T

7. The FlowLayout manager does not allow the programmer to align components.

ANS: F

8. You must use the statement import java.swing.*; in order to use the ItemListener interface.

ANS: F

9. When a splash screen is displayed, the application does not load and execute until the user clicks the splash
screen image with the mouse.

ANS: F

10. In Java, the ability to display splash screens was introduced in Java 6.

ANS: T
Random documents with unrelated
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specious present. The processes by which I think them, however, all
overlap. What events, then, does the specious present seem to
contain? Simply my successive acts of thinking these long-past
things, not the long-past things themselves. As the instantly-present
thought may be of a long-past thing, so the just-past thought may
be of another long-past thing. When a long-past event is reproduced
in memory and conceived with its date, the reproduction and
conceiving traverse the specious present. The immediate content of
the latter is thus all my direct experiences, whether subjective or
objective. Some of these meanwhile may be representative of other
experiences indefinitely remote.
The number of these direct experiences which the specious present
and immediately-intuited past may embrace measures the extent of
our 'primary,' as Exner calls it, or, as Richet calls it, of our
'elementary' memory.[561] The sensation resultant from the
overlapping is that of the duration which the experiences seem to
fill. As is the number of any larger set of events to that of these
experiences, so we suppose is the length of that duration to this
duration. But of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing
sense.' The variations in our appreciation of the same amount of real
time may possibly be explained by alterations in the rate of fading in
the images, producing changes in the complication of superposed
processes, to which changes changed states of consciousness may
correspond. But however long we may conceive a space of time to
be, the objective amount of it which is directly perceived at any one
moment by us can never exceed the scope of our 'primary memory'
at the moment in question.[562]
We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ
enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel,
and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Bær has
indulged[563] in some interesting computations of the effect of such
differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able,
within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly,
instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold
the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short.
We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of
the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in
summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era.
The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to
be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon
be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the
hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the
sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live
1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like
quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will
shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations;
annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling-
water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us
the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour
through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc.
That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may
be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to
deny.

"A gnat's wings," says Mr Spencer,[564] "make ten or fifteen

thousand strokes a second. Each stroke implies a separate
nervous action. Each such nervous action or change in a
nervous centre is probably as appreciable by the gnat as is a
quick movement of his arm by a man. And if this, or anything
like this, is the fact, then the time occupied by a given external
change, measured by many movements in the one case, must
seem much longer than in the other case, when measured by
one movement."

In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent

time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere the end is reached
the beginning seems already to date from indefinitely long ago. We
enter a short street, and it is as if we should never get to the end of
it. This alteration might conceivably result from an approach to the
condition of Von Bær's and Spencer's short-lived beings. If our
discrimination of successions became finer-grained, so that we noted
ten stages in a process where previously we only noted one; and if
at the same time the processes faded ten times as fast as before;
we might have a specious present of the same subjective length as
now, giving us the same time-feeling and containing as many
distinguishable successive events, but out from the earlier end of it
would have dropped nine tenths of the real events it now contains.
They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merely dated
memories, reproducible at will. The beginning of our sentences
would have to be expressly recalled; each word would appear to
pass through consciousness at a tenth of its usual speed. The
condition would, in short, be exactly analogous to the enlargement
of space by a microscope; fewer real things at once in the
immediate field of view, but each of them taking up more than its
normal room, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally far
away.
Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly without the
compensating increase in the subdivisibility of successions. Here the
apparent length of the specious present contracts. Consciousness
dwindles to a point, and loses all intuitive sense of the whence and
whither of its path. Express acts of memory replace rapid bird's-eye
views. In my own case, something like this occurs in extreme
fatigue. Long illnesses produce it. Occasionally, it appears to
accompany aphasia.[565] It would be vain to seek to imagine the
exact brain-change in any of these cases But we must admit the
possibility that to some extent the variations of time-estimate
between youth and age, and excitement and ennui, are due to such
causes, more immediate than to the one we assigned some time
ago.
But whether our feeling of the time which immediately-past[566]
events have filled be of something long or of something short, it is
not what it is because those events are past, but because they have
left behind them processes which are present. To those processes,
however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling a specious
present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished into the past.
As the Creator is supposed to have made Adam with a navel—sign of
a birth which never occurred—so He might instantaneously make a
man with a brain in which were processes just like the 'fading' ones
of an ordinary brain. The first real stimulus after creation would set
up a process additional to these. The processes would overlap; and
the new-created man would unquestionably have the feeling, at the
very primal instant of his life, of having been in existence already
some little space of time.
Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of
a certain duration—the specious present—varying in length from a
few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this
duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and
the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer times are
conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this
vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically.
Kant's notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary
continuum has nothing to support it. The cause of the intuition
which we really have cannot be the duration of our brain-processes
or our mental changes. That duration is rather the object of the
intuition which, being realized at every moment of such duration,
must be due to a permanently present cause. This cause—probably
the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phase—
fluctuates; and hence a certain range of variation in the amount of
the intuition, and in its subdivisibility, accrues.
[512] This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, vol. xx, p. 374.
[513] James Mill, Analysis, vol. x, p. 319 (J. S. Mill's edition).
[514] "What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I cannot
divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousness at all, is a
sequence of different feelings.... The simultaneous perception of both sub-
feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence, is the total feeling—
the minimum of consciousness—and this minimum has duration.... Time-duration,
however, is inseparable from the minimum, notwithstanding that, in an isolated
moment, we could not tell which part of it came first, which last.... We do not
require to know that the sub-feelings come in sequence, first one, then the other;
nor to know what coming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially
isolated minimum of consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and
latter in time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling that grows
stronger, and the change between them....
"In the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involved in the
minimum of consciousness. The first beginnings of it appear in that minimum, just
as the first beginnings of perception do. As each member of the change or
difference which goes to compose that minimum is the rudiment of a single
perception, so the priority of one member to the other, although both are given to
consciousness in one empirical present moment, is the rudiment of memory. The
fact that the minimum of consciousness is difference or change in feelings, is the
ultimate explanation of memory as well as of single perceptions. A former and a
latter are included in the minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by
saying that all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of
feeling, the form of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the course of time
into past, present, and future; but, strictly speaking, there is no present; it is
composed of past and future divided by an indivisible point or instant. That
instant, or time-point, is the strict present. What we call, loosely, the present, is an
empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least a minimum of
consciousness, in which the instant of change is the present time-point.... If we
take this as the present time-point, it is clear that the minimum of feeling contains
two portions—a sub-feeling that goes and a sub-feeling that comes. One is
remembered, the other imagined. The limits of both are indefinite at beginning
and end of the minimum, and ready to melt into other minima, proceeding from
other stimuli.
"Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out into minima; we
have to do that by reflection, asking ourselves, What is the least empirical moment
of consciousness? That least empirical moment is what we usually call the present
moment; and even this is too minute for ordinary use; the present moment is
often extended practically to a few seconds, or even minutes, beyond which we
specify what length of time we mean, as the present hour, or day, or year, or
century.
"But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers even of
philosophically-minded people, and they talk about the present as if it was a
datum—as if time came to us marked into present periods like a measuring-tape."
(S. H. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, vol. i, pp. 248-254.)
"The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certain amount of
it must be presented together—included between its initial and terminal limit. A
continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another, would indeed occupy time,
but not represent it, for it would exchange one element of succession for another
instead of grasping the whole succession at once. Both points—the beginning and
the end—are equally essential to the conception of time, and must be present with
equal clearness together." (Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)
"Assume that ... similar pendulum-strokes follow each other at regular intervals in
a consciousness otherwise void. When the first one is over, an image of it remains
in the fancy until the second succeeds. This, then, reproduces the first by virtue of
the law of association by similarity, but at the same time meets with the aforesaid
persisting image.... Thus does the simple repetition of the sound provide all the
elements of time-perception. The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives
the beginning, the second the end, and the persistent image in the fancy
represents the length of the interval. At the moment of the second impression, the
entire time-perception exists at once, for then all its elements are presented
together, the second sound and the image in the fancy immediately, and the first
impression by reproduction. But, in the same act, we are aware of a state in which
only the first sound existed, and of another in which only its image existed in the
fancy. Such a consciousness as this is that of time.... In it no succession of ideas
takes place." (Wundt: Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 681-2.) Note here the
assumption that the persistence and the reproduction of an impression are two
processes which may go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt's description is merely
an attempt to analyze the 'deliverance' of a time-perception, and no explanation of
the manner in which it comes about.
[515] The Alternative, p. 167.
[516] Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflection on the
succession of our ideas (Essay, book ii, chap. xiv, § 3; chap. xv, § 12). Reid justly
remarks that if ten successive elements are to make duration, "then one must
make duration, otherwise duration must be made up of parts that have no
duration, which is impossible.... I conclude, therefore, that there must be duration
in every single interval or element of which the whole duration is made up.
Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that every elementary part of extension
must have extension. Now, it must be observed that in these elements of duration,
or single intervals of successive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must
conceive them to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that
there is a conception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the
mind." (Intellectual Powers, essay iii, chap. v.) "Qu'on ne cherche point," says
Royer-Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of Reid, "la durée
dans la succession; on ne l'y trouvera jamais; la durée a précédé la succession; la
notion de la durée a précédé la notion de la succession. Elle en est donc tout-à-fait
indépendante, dira-t-on? Oui, elle en est tout-à-fait indépendante."
[517] Physiol. Psych., ii, 54, 55.
[518] Ibid. ii, 213.
[519] Philosophische Studien, ii, 362.
[520] Counting was of course not permitted. It would have given a symbolic
concept and no intuitive or immediate perception of the totality of the series. With
counting we may of course compare together series of any length—series whose
beginnings have faded from our mind, and of whose totality we retain no sensible
impression at all. To count a series of clicks is an altogether different thing from
merely perceiving them as discontinuous. In the latter case we need only be
conscious of the bits of empty duration between them; in the former we must
perform rapid acts of association between them and as many names of numbers.
[521] Estel in Wundt's Philosophische Studien, ii, 50. Mehner, ibid. ii, 571. In
Dietze's experiments even numbers of strokes were better caught than odd ones,
by the ear. The rapidity of their sequence had a great influence on the result. At
more than 4 seconds apart it was impossible to perceive series of them as units in
all (cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., ii, 214). They were simply counted as so many
individual strokes. Below 0.21 to 0.11 second, according to the observer, judgment
again became confused. It was found that the rate of succession most favorable
for grasping long series was when the strokes were sounded at intervals of from
0.3'' to 0.18' apart. Series of 4, 6, 8, 16 were more easily identified than series of
10, 12, 14, 18. The latter could hardly be clearly grasped at all. Among odd
numbers 3, 5, 7 were the series easiest caught; next, 9, 15; hardest of all, 11 and
13; and 17 was impossible to apprehend.
[522] The exact interval of the sparks was 0.00205''. The doubleness of their snap
was usually replaced by a single-seeming sound when it fell to 0.00198'', the
sound becoming louder when the sparks seemed simultaneous. The difference
between these two intervals is only 7/100000 of a second; and, as Exner remarks,
our ear and brain must be wonderfully efficient organs to get distinct feelings from
so slight an objective difference as this. See Pflüger's Archiv, Bd. xi.
[523] Ibid. p. 407. When the sparks fell so close together that their irradiation-
circles overlapped, they appeared like one spark moving from the position of the
first to that of the second; and they might then follow each other as close as
0.015'' without the direction of the movement ceasing to be clear. When one spark
fell on the centre, the other on the margin, of the retina, the time-interval for
successive apprehension had to be raised to 0.076''.
[524] Hall and Jastrow: Studies of Rhythm. Mind, xi, 58.
[525] Nevertheless, multitudinous impressions may be felt as discontinuous,
though separated by excessively minute intervals of time. Grünhagen says
(Pflüger's Archiv, vi, 175) that 10,000 electric shocks a second are felt as
interrupted, by the tongue (!). Von Wittich (ibid. ii, 329), that between 1000 and
2000 strokes a second are felt as discrete by the finger. W. Preyer, on the other
hand (Die Grenzen des Empfindungsvermögens, etc., 1868, p. 15), makes contacts
appear continuous to the finger when 36.8 of them follow in a second. Similarly,
Mach (Wiener Sitzgsb., li, 2, 142) gives about 26. Lalanne (Comptes Rendus,
i/xxxii, p. 1314) found summation of finger contacts after 22 repetitions in a
second. Such discrepant figures are of doubtful worth. On the retina 20 to 30
impressions a second at the very utmost can be felt as discrete when they fail on
the same spot. The ear, which begins to fuse stimuli together into a musical tone
when they follow at the rate of a little over 30 a second, can still feel 132 of them
a second as discontinuous when they take the shape of 'beats' (Helmholtz,
Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. p. 270).
[526] Pflüger's Archiv, xi, 428. Also in Herrmann's Hdbh. d. Physiol., 2 Bd. i, Thl.
pp. 260-2.
[527] Pflüger's Archiv, vii, 639. Tigerstedt (Bihang till Kongl. Svenska Vetenskaps
Akad, Handl., Bd. 8, Häfte 2, Stockholm, 1884) revises Exner's figures, and shows
that his conclusions are exaggerated. According to Tigerstedt, two observers
almost always rightly appreciated 0.05 or 0.06'' of reaction-time difference. Half
the time they did it rightly when the difference sank to 0.03'', though from 0.03''
and 0.06'' differences were often not noticed at all. Buccola found (La Legge del
Tempo nei Fenomeni dei Pensiero, Milano, 1883, p. 371) that, after much practice
in making rapid reactions upon a signal, he estimated directly, in figures, his own
reaction-time, in 10 experiments, with an error of from 0.016'' to 0.018''; in 6, with
one of 0.005'' to 0.069''; in one, with one of 0.002''; and in 3, with one of 0.003''.
[528] Mind, xi, 61 (1886).
[529] Mach, Wiener Sitzungsb., li, 2. 133 (1865); Estel, loc. cit. p. 65; Mehner, loc.
cit. p. 586; Buccola, op. cit. p. 378. Fechner labors to prove that his law is only
overlaid by other interfering laws in the figures recorded by these experimenters;
but his case seems to me to be one of desperate infatuation with a hobby. (See
Wundt's Philosphische Studien iii, 1.)
[530] Curious discrepancies exist between the German and the American
observers with respect to the direction of the error below and above the point of
indifference—differences perhaps due the fatigue involved in the American
method. The Germans lengthened intervals below it and shortened those above.
With seven Americans experimented on by Stevens this was exactly reversed. The
German method was to passively listen to the intervals, then judge; the American
was to reproduce them actively by movements of the hand. In Mehner's
experiments there was found a second indifference point at about 5 seconds,
beyond which times were judged again too long. Glass, whose work on the subject
is the latest (Philos. Studien, iv, 423) found (when corrections were allowed for)
that all times except 0.8 sec. were estimated too short. He found a series of points
of greatest relative accuracy, viz. at 1.5, 2.5, 3.75, 5, 6.25, etc., seconds
respectively, and thought that his observations roughly corroborated Weber's law.
As 'maximum' and 'minimum' are printed interchangeably in Glass's article it is
hard to follow.
[531] With Vierordt and his pupils the indifference point lay as high as from 1.5
sec to 4.9 sec, according to the observer (cf. Der Zeitsinn, 1868, p. 112). In most
of these experiments the time heard was actively reproduced, after a short pause,
by movements of the hand, which were recorded. Wundt gives good reasons
(Physiol. Psych., ii, 289, 290) for rejecting Vierordt's figures as erroneous.
Vierordt's book, it should be said, is full of important matter, nevertheless.
[532] Physiol. Psych., ii, 286, 290.
[533] Philosophische Studien, i, 86.
[534] Mind, xi, 400.
[535] Loc cit. p. 144.
[536] Op. cit. p. 376. Mach's and Buccola's figures, it will be observed, are about
one half of the rest—sub-multiples, therefore. It ought to be observed, however,
that Buccola's figure has little value, his observations not being well fitted to show
this particular point.
[537] Estel's figures led him to think that all the multiples enjoyed this privilege;
with Mehner, on the other hand, only the odd multiples showed diminution of the
average error; thus, 0.71, 2.15, 3.55, 5, 6.4, 7.8, 9.3, and 10.65 second were
respectively registered with the least error. Cf. Phil. Studien, ii, pp. 57, 562-5.
[538] Cf. especially pp. 558-561.
[539] Wundt: Physiol. Psych., ii, 287. Hall and Jastrow: Mind, xi, 62.
[540] Mehner: loc. cit. p. 553.
[541] The number of distinguishable differences of speed between these limits is,
as he takes care to remark, very much larger that 7. (Der Zeitsinn, p. 137).
[542] P. 19, § 18, p. 112.
[543] I leave the text just as it was printed in the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy (for 'Oct. 1886') in 1887. Since then Münsterberg in his masterly
Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie (Heft 2, 1889) seems to have made it
clear what the sensible changes are by which we measure the lapse of time. When
the time which separates two sensible impressions is less than one third of a
second, he thinks it is almost entirely the amount to which the memory-image of
the first impression has faded when the second one overtakes it, which makes us
feel how wide they are apart (p. 29). When the time is longer than this, we rely,
he thinks, exclusively upon the feelings of muscular tension and relaxation, which
we are constantly receiving although we give to them so little of our direct
attention. These feelings are primarily in the muscles by which we adopt our
sense-organs in attending to the signals used, some of the muscles being in the
eye and ear themselves, some of them in the head, neck, etc. We here judge two
time-intervals to be equal when between the beginning and end of each we feel
exactly similar relaxations and subsequent expectant tensions of these muscles to
have occurred. In reproducing intervals ourselves we try to make our feelings of
this sort just what they were when we passively heard the interval. These feelings
by themselves, however, can only be used when the intervals are very short, for
the tension anticipatory of the terminal stimulus naturally reaches its maximum
very soon. With longer intervals we take the feeling of our inspirations and
expirations into account. With our expirations all the other muscular tensions in
our body undergo a rhythmical decrease; with our inspirations the reverse takes
place. When, therefore, we note a time-interval of several seconds with intent to
reproduce it, what we seek is to make the earlier and later interval agree in the
number and amount of these respiratory changes combined with sense-organ
adjustments with which they are filled. Münsterberg has studied carefully in his
own ease the variations of the respiratory factor. They are many; but he sums up
his experience by saying that whether he measured by inspirations that were
divided by momentary pauses into six parts, or by inspirations that were
continuous; whether with sensory tension during inspiration and relaxation during
expiration, or by tension during both inspiration and expiration, separated by a
sudden interpolated relaxation; whether with special notice taken of the cephalic
tensions, or of those in the trunk and shoulders, in all cases alike and without
exception he involuntarily endeavored, whenever he compared two times or tried
to make one the same as the other, to get exactly the same respiratory conditions
and conditions of tension, all the subjective conditions, in short, exactly the same
during the second interval as they were during the first. Münsterberg corroborated
his subjective observations by experiments. The observer of the time had to
reproduce as exactly as possible an interval between two sharp sounds given him
by an assistant. The only condition imposed upon him was that he should not
modify his breathing for the purposes of measurement. It was then found that
when the assistant broke in at random with his signals, the judgment of the
observer was vastly less accurate than when the assistant carefully watched the
observer's breathing and made both the beginning of the time given him and that
of the time which he was to give coincide with identical phases thereof.—Finally,
Münsterberg with great plausibility tries to explain the discrepancies between the
results of Vierordt, Estel, Mehner, Glass, etc., as due to the fact that they did not
all use the same measure. Some breathe a little faster, some a little slower. Some
break their inspirations into two parts, some do not, etc. The coincidence of the
objective times measured with definite natural phases of breathing would very
easily give periodical maxima of facility in measuring accurately.
[544] "Any one wishing yet further examples of this mental substitution will find
one on observing how habitually he thinks of the spaces on the clock-face instead
of the periods they stand for; how, on discovering it to be half an hour later than
be supposed, he does not represent the half hour in its duration, but scarcely
passes beyond the sign of it marked by the finger." (H. Spencer: Psychology, §
336.)
[545] The only objections to this which I can think of are: (1) The accuracy with
which some men judge of the hour of day or night without looking at the clock;
(2) the faculty some have of waking at a preappointed hour; (3) the accuracy of
time-perception reported to exist in certain trance-subjects. It might seem that in
these persons some sort of a sub-conscious record was kept of the lapse of time
per se. But this cannot be admitted until it is proved that there are no
physiological processes, the feeling of whose course may serve as a sign of how
much time has sped, and so lead us to infer the hour. That there are such
processes it is hardly possible to doubt. An ingenious friend of mine was long
puzzled to know why each day of the week had such a characteristic physiognomy
to him. That of Sunday was soon noticed to be due to the cessation of the city's
rumbling, and the sound of people's feet shuffling on the sidewalk; of Monday, to
come from the clothes drying in the yard and casting a white reflection on the
ceiling; of Tuesday, to a cause which I forget; and I think my friend did not get
beyond Wednesday. Probably each hour in the day has for most of us some outer
or inner sign associated with it as closely as these signs with the days of the week.
It must be admitted, after all, however, that the great improvement of the time-
perception during sleep and trance is a mystery not as yet cleared up. All my life I
have been struck by the accuracy with which I will wake at the same exact minute
night after night and morning after morning, if only the habit fortuitously begins.
The organic registration in me is independent of sleep. After lying in bed a long
time awake I suddenly rise without knowing the time, and for days and weeks
together will do so at an identical minute by the clock, as if some inward
physiological process caused the act by punctually running down.—Idiots are said
sometimes to possess the time-measuring faculty in a marked degree. I have an
interesting manuscript account of an idiot girl which says: "She was punctual
almost to a minute in her demand for food and other regular attentions. Her
dinner was generally furnished her at 12.30 p. m., and at that hour she would
begin to scream if it were not forthcoming. If on Fast-day or Thanksgiving it were
delayed, in accordance with the New England custom, she screamed from her
usual dinner-hour until the food was carried to her. On the next day, however, she
again made known her wants promptly at 12.30. Any slight attention shown her
on one day was demanded on the next at the corresponding hour. If an orange
were given her at 4 p. m. on Wednesday, at the same hour on Thursday she made
known her expectation, and if the fruit were not given her she continued to call for
it at intervals for two or three hours. At four on Friday the process would be
repeated but would last less long; and so on for two or three days. If one of her
sisters visited her accidentally at a certain hour, the sharp piercing scream was
sure to summon her at the same hour the next day," etc., etc.—For these obscure
matters consult C. Du Prel: The Philosophy of Mysticism, chap. iii, § 1.
[546] Ideale Fragen (1878). p. 219 (Essay, 'Zeit und Weile').
[547] Revue Philosophique, vol. iii, p. 496.
[548] "Empty time is most strongly perceived when it comes as a pause in music
or in speech. Suppose a preacher in the pulpit, a professor at his desk, to stick still
in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as is sometimes purposely done)
make all his instruments stop at once; we await every instant the resumption of
the performance, and, in this awaiting, perceive, more than in any other possible
way, the empty time. To change the example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music—
a figure, for instance, in which a tangle of melodies are under way—suddenly a
single voice be heard, which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed.... This
one note will appear very protracted—why? Because we expect to hear
accompanying it the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come."
(Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)—Compare also Münsterberg, Beiträge, Heft 2, p.
41.
[549] A night of pain will seem terribly long: we keep looking forward to a
moment which never comes—the moment when it shall cease. But the odiousness
of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile, like the odiousness of time
that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive odiousness of the pain,
rather, is what tinges our memory of the night. What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says
(op. cit. p. 202), is the long time of the suffering, not the suffering of the long
time per se.
[550] On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of Time,
in Mind, vol. iii, p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305; W. Wundt.
Physiol. Psych., ii, 287, 288; besides the essays quoted from Lazarus and Janet. In
German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare
Volkmann's Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 89, and for references to other authors his note
3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir. Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances
Alexander the Great's life (thirty-three years), which seems to us as if it must be
long, because it was so eventful. Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc.
[551] Physiol. Optik, p. 445.
[552] Succession, time per se, is no force. Our talk about its devouring tooth, etc.,
is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of inertia is incompatible with
time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything.
[553] Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 87. Compare also H. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154.
[554] The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived!
[555] "'No more' and 'not yet' are the proper time-feelings, and we are aware of
time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volkmann (Psychol., § 87).
This, which is not strictly true of our feeling of time per se, as an elementary bit of
duration, is true of our feeling of date in its events.
[556] We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in the cars
makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes. When those
that have passed from present sight revive in memory, they maintain their mutual
order because their contents overlap. We think them as having been before or
behind each other; and, from the multitude of the views we can recall behind the
one now presented, we compute the total space we have passed through.
It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of space,
because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterday and after to-
morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that exceed as greatly their
unit of space-intuition. Recently I heard my child of four tell a visitor that he had
been 'as much as one week' in the country. As he had been there three months,
the visitor expressed surprise; whereupon the child corrected himself by saying he
had been there 'twelve years.' But the child made exactly the same kind of
mistake when he asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the
distance being three miles.
[557] Most of these explanations simply give the signs which, adhering to
impressions, lead us to date them within a duration, or, in other words, to assign
to them their order. Why it should be a time-order, however, is not explained.
Herbart's would-be explanation is a simple description of time-perception. He says
it comes when, with the last member of a series present to our consciousness, we
also think of the first; and then the whole series revives in our thought at once,
but with strength diminishing in the backward direction (Psychol. als Wiss., § 115;
Lehrb. zur Psychol., §§ 171, 172, 175). Similarly Drobisch, who adds that the
series must appear as one already elapsed (durchlaufene), a word which shows
even more clearly the question-begging nature of this sort of account (Empirische
Psychol., § 59). Th. Waitz is guilty of similar question-begging when he explains
our time-consciousness to be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to
make our percepts agree with our expectations (Lehrb. d. Psychol., § 52).
Volkmann's mythological account of past representations striving to drive present
ones out of the seat of consciousness, being driven back by them, etc., suffers
from the same fallacy (Psychol., § 87). But all such accounts agree in implying one
fact—viz., that the brain-processes of various events must be active
simultaneously, and in varying strength, for a time-perception to be possible. Later
authors have made this idea more precise. Thus, Lipps: "Sensations arise, occupy
consciousness, fade into images, and vanish. According as two of them, a and b,
go through this process simultaneously, or as one precedes or follows the other,
the phases of their fading will agree or differ; and the difference will be
proportional to the time-difference between their several moments of beginning.
Thus there are differences of quality in the images, which the mind may translate
into corresponding differences of their temporal order. There is no other possible
middle term between the objective time-relations and those in the mind than
these differences of phase." (Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 588.) Lipps
accordingly calls them 'temporal signs,' and hastens explicitly to add that the soul's
translation of their order of strength into a time-order is entirely inexplicable (p.
591). M. Guyau's account (Revue Philosophique, xix, 353) hardly differs from that
of his predecessors, except in picturesqueness of style. Every change leaves a
series of trainées lumineuses in the mind like the passage of shooting stars. Each
image is in a more fading phase, according as its original was more remote. This
group of images gives duration, the mere time-form, the 'bed' of time. The
distinction of past, present, and future within the bed comes from our active
nature. The future (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got, and must
wait for. All this is doubtless true, but is no explanation.
Mr. Ward gives, in his Encyclopædia Britannica article (Psychology, p. 65, col. 1), a
still more refined attempt to specify the 'temporal sign.' The problem being,
among a number of other things thought as successive, but simultaneously
thought, to determine which is first and which last, he says: "After each distinct
representation, a b c d, there may intervene the representation of that movement
of attention of which we are aware in passing from one object to another. In our
present reminiscence we have, it must be allowed, little direct proof of this
intervention; though there is, I think, indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the
flow of ideas to follow the order in which the presentations were at first attended
to. With the movement itself when the direction of attention changes, we are
familiar enough, though the residua of such movements are not ordinarily
conspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs.... But temporal signs
alone will not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the time-perspective. These give
us only a fixed series; but the law of obliviscence, by insuring a progressive
variation in intensity as we pass from one member of the series to the other, yields
the effect which we call time-distance. By themselves such variations in intensity
would leave us liable to confound more vivid representations in the distance with
fainter ones nearer the present, but from this mistake the temporal signs save us;
where the memory-continuum is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. On the
other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though the
memory-continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still no such
distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearer to the
present, where these perceptive effects are considerable.... Locke speaks of our
ideas succeeding each other 'at certain distances not much unlike the images in
the inside of a lantern turned round by the heat of a candle,' and 'guesses' that
'this appearance of theirs in train varies not very much in a waking man.' Now
what is this 'distance' that separates a from b, b from c, and so on; and what
means have we of knowing that it is tolerably constant in waking life? It is,
probably, that, the residuum of which I have called a temporal sign; or, in other
words, it is the movement of attention from a to b." Nevertheless, Mr. Ward does
not call our feeling of this movement of attention the original of our feeling of
time, or its brain-process the brain-process which directly causes us to perceive
time. He says, a moment later, that "though the fixation of attention does of
course really occupy time, it is probably not in the first instance perceived as time
—i.e. as continuous 'protensity,' to use a term of Hamilton's—but as intensity.
Thus, if this supposition be true, there is an element in our concrete time
perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception of Time. In Time
physically conceived there is no trace of intensity; in time psychically experienced,
duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, and so far literally a perception." Its
'original' is, then, if I understand Mr Ward, something like a feeling which
accompanies, as pleasure and pain may accompany, the movements of attention.
Its brain-process must, it would seem, be assimilated in general type to the brain-
processes of pleasure and pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be
Mr. Ward's own view, for he says: "Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by
a rapid succession of varied impressions, and equally what it is to be wearied by
the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same impressions. Now these
'feelings' of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualities to movements
of attention. In the first, attention is kept incessantly on the move; before it is
accommodated to a, it is disturbed by the suddenness, intensity, and novelty of b;
in the second, it is kept all but stationary by the repeated presentation of the
same impression. Such excess and defect of surprises make one realize a fact
which in ordinary life is so obscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments
have set this fact in a more striking light, and made clear what Locke had dimly
before his mind in talking of a certain distance between the presentations of a
waking man. In estimating very short periods of time of a second or less,
indicated, say, by the beats of a metronome, it is found that there is a certain
period for which the mean of a number of estimates is correct, while shorter
periods are on the whole over-, and longer periods under-estimated. I take this to
be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention." Alluding
to the fact that a series of experiences, a b c d e, may seem short in retrospect,
which seemed everlasting in passing, he says: "What tells in retrospect is the
series a b c d e, etc.; what tells in the present is the intervening t1 t2 t3, etc., or
rather the original accommodation of which these temporal signs are the
residuum." And he concludes thus: "We seem to have proof that our perception of
duration rests ultimately upon quasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the
duration of which we do not directly experience as duration at all."
Wundt also thinks that the interval of about three-fourths of a second, which is
estimated with the minimum of error, points to a connection between the time-
feeling and the succession of distinctly 'apperceived' objects before the mind. The
'association-time' is also equal to about three fourths of a second. This
association-time he regards as a sort of internal standard of duration to which we
involuntarily assimilate all intervals which we try to reproduce, bringing shorter
ones up to it and longer ones down. [In the Stevens result we should have to say
contrast instead of assimilate, for the longer intervals there seem longer, and the
shorter ones shorter still.] "Singularly enough," he adds (Physiol. Psych., ii, 286),
"this time is about that in which in rapid walking, according to the Webers, our
legs perform their swing. It seems thus not unlikely that both psychical constants,
that of the average speed of reproduction and that of the surest estimation of
time, have formed themselves under the influence of those most habitual
movements of the body which we also use when we try to subdivide rhythmically
longer tracts of time."
Finally, Prof. Mach makes a suggestion more specific still. After saying very rightly
that we have a real sensation of time—how otherwise should we identify two
entirely different airs as being played in the same 'time'? how distinguish in
memory the first stroke of the clock from the second, unless to each there clove
its special time-sensation, which revived with it?—he says "it is probable that this
feeling is connected with that organic consumption which is necessarily linked with
the production of consciousness, and that the time which we feel is probably due
to the [mechanical?] work of [the process of?] attention. When attention is
strained, time seems long; during easy occupation, short, etc.... The fatigue of the
organ of consciousness, as long as we wake, continually increases, and the work
of attention augments as continually. Those impressions which are conjoined with
a greater amount of work of attention appear to us as the later." The apparent
relative displacement of certain simultaneous events and certain anachronisms of
dreams are held by Mach to be easily explicable as effects of a splitting of the
attention between two objects, one of which consumes most of it (Beiträge zur
Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 103 foll.). Mach's theory seems worthy of being
better worked out. It is hard to say now whether he, Ward, and Wundt mean at
bottom the same thing or not. The theory advanced in my own text, it will be
remarked, does not pretend to be an explanation, but only an elementary
statement of the 'law' which makes us aware of time. The Herbartian mythology
purports to explain.
[558] It would be rash to say definitely just how many seconds long this specious
present must needs be, for processes fade 'asymptotically,' and the distinctly
intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim recency before it turns into
the past which is simply reproduced and conceived. Many a thing which we do not
distinctly date by intercalating it in a place between two other things will,
nevertheless, come to us with this feeling of belonging to a near past. This sense
of recency is a feeling sui generis, and may affect things that happened hours ago.
It would seem to show that their brain-processes are still in a state modified by
the foregoing excitement, still in a 'fading' phase, in spite of the long interval.
[559] Physiol. Psych, ii, 263.
[560] I leave my text as it was printed before Münsterberg's essay appeared (see
Footnote 542, above). He denies that we measure any but minimal durations by
the amount of fading in the ideational processes, and talks almost exclusively of
our feelings of muscular tension in his account, whereas I have made no mention
of such things in mine. I cannot, however, see that there is any conflict between
what he and I suggest. I am mainly concerned with the consciousness of duration
regarded as a specific sort of object, he is concerned with this object's
measurement exclusively. Feelings of tension might be the means of the
measurement, whilst overlapping processes of any and every kind gave the object
to be measured. The accommodative and respiratory movements from which the
feelings of tension come form regularly recurring sensations divided by their
'phases' into intervals as definite as those by which a yardstick is divided by the
marks upon its length.
Let a1, a2, a3, a4, be homologous phases in four successive movements of this
kind. If four outer stimuli 1, 2, 3, 4, coincide each with one of these successive
phases, then their 'distances apart' are felt as equal, otherwise not. But there is no
reason whatever to suppose that the mere overlapping of the brain-process of 2
by the fading process of 1, or that of 3 by that of 2, etc., does not give the
characteristic quality of content which we call 'distance apart' in this experience,
and which by aid of the muscular feelings gets judged to be equal. Doubtless the
muscular feelings can give us the object 'time' as well as its measure, because
their earlier phases leave fading sensations which constantly overlap the vivid
sensation of the present phase. But it would be contrary to analogy to suppose
that they should be the only experiences which give this object. I do not
understand Herr Münsterberg to claim this for them. He takes our sense of time
for granted, and only discusses its measurement.
[561] Exner in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. ii, Thl. ii, p. 281. Richet in Revue
Philosophique, xxi, 568 (juin, 1886). See the next chapter, pp. 642-646.
[562] I have spoken of fading brain-processes alone, but only for simplicity's sake.
Dawning processes probably play as important a part in giving the feeling of
duration to the specious present.
[563] Reden (St. Petersburg, 1864), vol. i, pp. 255-268.
[564] Psychology, § 91.
[565] "The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than a moment. His
memory is as short for sounds, letters, figures, and printed words. If we cover a
written or printed word with a sheet of paper in which a little window has been
cut, so that only the first letter is visible through the window, he pronounces this
letter. If, then, the sheet is moved so as to cover the first letter and make the
second one visible, he pronounces the second, but forgets the first, and cannot
pronounce the first and second together." And so forth to the end. "If he closes his
eyes and draws his finger exploringly over a well-known object like a knife or key,
he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. But if it is
put into his hand so that he can simultaneously touch it with several fingers, he
names it without difficulty. This patient has thus lost the capacity for grouping
successive ... impressions ... into a whole and perceiving them as a whole."
(Grashey, in Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. xvi, pp. 672-673.) It is hard to believe that
in such a patient the time intuited was not clipped off like the impressions it held,
though perhaps not so much of it.
I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of time-perspective at the
moment of a falling asleep. A person will be moving or doing something in the
room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be) will be my last waking
perception. Then a subsequent stage will wake me to a new perception. The two
stages of the act will not be more than a few seconds apart; and yet it always
seems to me as if, between the earlier and the later one, a long interval has
passed away. I conjecturally account for the phenomenon thus, calling the two
stages of the act a and b respectively: Were I awake, a would leave a fading
process in my sensorium which would overlap the process of b when the latter
came, and both would then appear in the same specious present, a belonging to
its earlier end. But the sudden advent of the brain-change called sleep
extinguishes a's fading process abruptly. When b then comes and wakes me, a
comes back, it is true, but not as belonging to the specious present. It has to be
specially revoked in memory. This mode of revocation usually characterizes long-
past things—whence the illusion.
[566] Again I omit the future, merely for simplicity's sake.

CHAPTER XVI.

MEMORY.
In the last chapter what concerned us was the direct intuition of
time. We found it limited to intervals of considerably less than a
minute. Beyond its borders extends the immense region of
conceived time, past and future, into one direction or another of
which we mentally project all the events which we think of as real,
and form a systematic order of them by giving to each a date. The
relation of conceived to intuited time is just like that of the fictitious
space pictured on the flat back-scene of a theatre to the actual
space of the stage. The objects painted on the former (trees,
columns, houses in a receding street, etc.) carry back the series of
similar objects solidly placed upon the latter, and we think we see
things in a continuous perspective, when we really see thus only a
few of them and imagine that we see the rest. The chapter which
lies before us deals with the way in which we paint the remote past,
as it were, upon a canvas in our memory, and yet often imagine that
we have direct vision of its depths.
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into
the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the
instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments,
hours, or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are
indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long
as life endures. Can we explain these differences?

PRIMARY MEMORY.

The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind to survive in

memory it must have endured, for a certain length of time. In other
words, it must be what I call a substantive state. Prepositional and
conjunctival states of mind are not remembered as independent
facts—we cannot recall just how we felt when we said 'how' or
'notwithstanding.' Our consciousness of these transitive states is
shut up to their own moment—hence one difficulty in introspective
psychologizing.
Any state of mind which is shut up to its own moment and fails to
become an object for succeeding states of mind, is as if it belonged
to another stream of thought. Or rather, it belongs only physically,
not intellectually, to its own stream, forming a bridge from one
segment of it to another, but not being appropriated inwardly by
former segments or appearing as part of the empirical self, in the
manner explained in Chapter X. All the intellectual value for us of a
state of mind depends on our after-memory of it. Only then is it
combined in a system and knowingly made to contribute to a result.
Only then does it count for us. So that the effective consciousness we
have of our states is the after-consciousness; and the more of this
there is, the more influence does the original state have, and the
more permanent a factor is it of our world. An indelibly-imprinted
pain may color a life; but, as Professor Richet says:

"To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at

all; and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain,
however acute and intense it might be, provided it should last
only a hundredth of a second, and leave after it neither
reverberation nor recall."[567]

Not that a momentary state of consciousness need be practically

resultless. Far from it: such a state, though absolutely
unremembered, might at its own moment determine the transition of
our thinking in a vital way, and decide our action irrevocably.[568]
But the idea of it could not afterwards determine transition and
action, its content could not be conceived as one of the mind's
permanent meanings: that is all I mean by saying that its intellectual
value lies in after-memory.
As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the objective
stimulus which occasioned them. This phenomenon is the ground of
those 'after-images' which are familiar in the physiology of the
sense-organs. If we open our eyes instantaneously upon a scene,
and then shroud them in complete darkness, it will be as if we saw
the scene in ghostly light through the dark screen. We can read off
details in it which were unnoticed whilst the eyes were open.[569]
In every sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, often enough
repeated, produces a continuous sensation. This is because the
after-image of the impression just gone by blends with the new
impression coming in. The effects of stimuli may thus be superposed
upon each other many stages deep, the total result in consciousness
being an increase in the feeling's intensity, and in all probability, as
we saw in the last chapter, an elementary sense of the lapse of time
(see p. 635).
Exner writes:

"Impressions to which we are inattentive leave so brief an

image in the memory that it is usually overlooked. When deeply
absorbed, we do not hear the clock strike. But our attention
may awake after the striking has ceased, and we may then
count off the strokes. Such examples are often found in daily
life. We can also prove the existence of this primary memory-
image, as it may be called, in another person, even when his
attention is completely absorbed elsewhere. Ask someone, e.g.,
to count the lines of a printed page as fast as he can, and whilst
this is going on walk a few steps about the room. Then, when
the person has done counting, ask him where you stood. He will
always reply quite definitely that you have walked. Analogous
experiments may be made with vision. This primary memory-
image is, whether attention have been turned to the impression
or not, an extremely lively one, but is subjectively quite distinct
from every sort of after-image or hallucination.... It vanishes, if
not caught by attention, in the course of a few seconds. Even
when the original impression is attended to, the liveliness of its
image in memory fades fast."[570]

The physical condition in the nerve-tissue of this primary memory is

called by Richet 'elementary memory.'[571] I much prefer to reserve
the word memory for the conscious phenomenon. What happens in
the nerve-tissue is but an example of that plasticity or of semi-
inertness, yielding to change, but not yielding instantly or wholly,
and never quite recovering the original form, which, in Chapter V, we
saw to be the groundwork of habit. Elementary habit would be the
better name for what Professor Richet means. Well, the first
manifestation of elementary habit is the slow dying away of an
impressed movement on the neural matter, and its first effect in
consciousness is this so-called elementary memory. But what
elementary memory makes us aware of is the just past. The objects
we feel in this directly intuited past differ from properly recollected
objects. An object which is recollected, in the proper sense of that
term, is one which has been absent from consciousness altogether,
and now revives anew. It is brought back, recalled, fished up, so to
speak, from a reservoir in which, with countless other objects, it lay
buried and lost from view. But an object of primary memory is not
thus brought back; it never was lost; its date was never cut off in
consciousness from that of the immediately present moment. In fact
it comes to us as belonging to the rearward portion of the present
space of time, and not to the genuine past. In the last chapter we
saw that the portion of time which we directly intuit has a breadth of
several seconds, a rearward and a forward end, and may be called
the specious present. All stimuli whose first nerve-vibrations have
not yet ceased seem to be conditions of our getting this feeling of
the specious present. They give rise to objects which appear to the
mind as events just past.[572]
When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus for many
minutes or hours, a nervous process is set up which results in the
haunting of consciousness by the impression for a long time
afterwards. The tactile and muscular feelings of a day of skating or
riding, after long disuse of the exercise, will come back to us all
through the night. Images of the field of view of the microscope will
annoy the observer for hours after an unusually long sitting at the
instrument. A thread tied around the finger, an unusual constriction
in the clothing, will feel as if still there, long after they have been
removed. These revivals (called phenomena of Sinnesgedächtniss by
the Germans) have something periodical in their nature.[573] They
show that profound rearrangements and slow settlings into a new
equilibrium are going on in the neural substance, and they form the
transition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon of memory,
of which the rest of this chapter must treat. The first condition which
makes a thing susceptible of recall after it has been forgotten is that
the original impression of it should have been prolonged enough to
give rise to a recurrent image of it, as distinguished from one of
those primary after-images which very fleeting impressions may
leave behind, and which contain in themselves no guarantee that
they will ever come back after having once faded away.[574] A
certain length of stimulation seems demanded by the inertia of the
nerve-substance. Exposed to a shorter influence, its modification
fails to 'set,' and it retains no effective tendency to fall again into the
same form of vibration at which the original feeling was due. This, as
I said at the outset, may be the reason why only 'substantive' and
not 'transitive' states of mind are as a rule recollected, at least as
independent things. The transitive states pass by too quickly.

ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENON OF MEMORY.

Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be styled, is the

knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once
dropped from consciousness; or rather it is the knowledge of an
event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with
the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it
before.
The first element which such a knowledge involves would seem to
be the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event.
[575] And it is an assumption made by many writers[576] that the
revival of an image is all that is needed to constitute the memory of
the original occurrence. But such a revival is obviously not a
memory, whatever else it may be; it is simply a duplicate, a second
event, having absolutely no connection with the first event except
that it happens to resemble it. The clock strikes to-day; it struck
yesterday; and may strike a million times ere it wears out. The rain
pours through the gutter this week; it did so last week; and will do
so in sæcula sæculorum. But does the present clock-stroke become
aware of the past ones, or the present stream recollect the past
stream, because they repeat and resemble them? Assuredly not. And
let it not be said that this is because clock-strokes and gutters are
physical and not psychical objects; for psychical objects (sensations
for example) simply recurring in successive editions will remember
each other on that account no more than clock-strokes do. No
memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence. The successive
editions of a feeling are so many independent events, each snug in
its own skin. Yesterday's feeling is dead and buried; and the
presence of to-day's is no reason why it should resuscitate. A farther
condition is required before the present image can be held to stand
for a past original.
That condition is that the fact imaged be expressly referred to the
past, thought as in the past. But how can we think a thing as in the
past, except by thinking of the past together with the thing, and of
the relation of the two? And how can we think of the past? In the
chapter on Time-perception we have seen that our intuitive or
immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a
few seconds backward of the present instant of time. Remoter dates
are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as
'last week,' '1850;' or thought of by events which happened in them,
as the year in which we attended such a school, or met with such a
loss.—So that if we wish to think of a particular past epoch, we must
think of a name or other symbol, or else of certain concrete events,
associated therewithal. Both must be thought of, to think the past
epoch adequately. And to 'refer' any special fact to the past epoch is
to think that fact with the names and events which characterize its
date, to think it, in short, with a lot of contiguous associates.
But even this would not be memory. Memory requires more than
mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In
other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence.
It must have that 'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken
of in the chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences
'appropriated' by the thinker as his own.
A general feeling of the past direction in time, then, a particular date
conceived as lying along that direction, and I defined by its name or
phenomenal contents, an event imagined as located therein, and
owned as part of my experience,—such are the elements of every
act of memory.
It follows that what we began by calling the 'image,' or 'copy,' of the
fact in the mind, is really not there at all in that simple shape, as a
separate 'idea.' Or at least, if it be there as a separate idea, no
memory will go with it. What memory goes with is, on the contrary,
a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled plus its
associates, the whole forming one 'object' (as explained on page
275, Chapter IX), known in one integral pulse of consciousness (as
set forth on pp. 276 ff.) and demanding probably a vastly more
intricate brain-process than that on which any simple sensorial
image depends.
Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysis of the
phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for example, writes:

"Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh
in Titus' house. I say you recognize Mevius, that is, are
conscious of having seen him before because, although now you
perceive him with your senses along with Titus' house, your
imagination produces an image of him along with one of the
temple, and of the acts of your own mind reflecting on Mevius
in the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is reproduced in
sense is contained in another series of perceptions than that
which formerly contained it, and this difference is the reason
why we are conscious of having had it before.... For whilst now
you see Mevius in the house of Titus, your imagination places
him in the temple, and renders you conscious of the state of
 mind which you found in yourself when you beheld him there.
By this you know that you have seen him before, that is, you
recognize him. But you recognize him because his idea is now
contained in another series of perceptions from that in which
you first saw him."[577]

Similarly James Mill writes:

"In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses

of parliament, there is, first of all, the mere idea, or simple
apprehension, the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the
objects. There is combined with this, to make it memory, my
idea of my having seen and heard those objects. And this
combination is so close that it is not in my power to separate
them. I cannot have the idea of George III.: his person and
attitude, the paper he held in his hand, the sound of his voice
while reading from it; without having the other idea along with
it, that of my having been a witness of the scene.... If this
explanation of the case in which we remember sensations is
understood, the explanation of the case in which we remember
ideas cannot occasion much of difficulty. I have a lively
recollection of Polyphemus's cave, and the actions of Ulysses
and the Cyclops, as described by Homer. In this recollection
there is, first of all, the ideas, or simple conceptions of the
objects and acts; and along with these ideas, and so closely
combined as not to be separable, the idea of my having
formerly had those same ideas. And this idea of my having
formerly had those ideas is a very complicated idea; including
the idea of myself of the present moment remembering, and
that of myself of the past moment conceiving; and the whole
series of the states of consciousness, which intervened between
myself remembering, and myself conceiving."[578]

Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar complex object; but

all the elements of this object may be known to other states of
belief; nor is there in the particular combination of them as they
appear in memory anything so peculiar as to lead us to oppose the
latter to other sorts of thought as something altogether sui generis,
needing a special faculty to account for it. When later we come to
our chapter on Belief we shall see that any represented object which
is connected either mediately or immediately with our present
sensations or emotional activities tends to be believed in as a reality.
The sense of a peculiar active relation in it to ourselves is what gives
to an object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely
imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in the
absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electric current, so to
speak, between it and our present self does not close. But in their
other determinations the re-recollected past and the imaginary past
may be much the same. In other words, there is nothing unique in
the object of memory, and no special faculty is needed to account
for its formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as related
together, perception, imagination, comparison and reasoning being
analogous syntheses of parts into complex objects. The objects of
any of these faculties may awaken belief or fail to awaken it; the
object of memory is only an object imagined in the past (usually
very completely imagined there) to which the emotion of belief
adheres.

MEMORY'S CAUSES.

Such being the phenomenon of memory, or the analysis of its object,

can we see how it comes to pass? can we lay bare its causes?
Its complete exercise presupposes two things:
1) The retention of the remembered fact;
2) Its reminiscence, recollection, reproduction, or recall.
Now the cause both of retention and of recollection is the law of
habit in the nervous system, working as it does in the 'association of
ideas.'
Associationists have long explained recollection by association.
James Mill gives an account of it which I am unable to improve
upon, unless it might be by translating his word 'idea' into 'thing
thought of,' or 'object,' as explained so often before.

"There is," he says, "a state of mind familiar to all men, in which
we are said to remember. In this state it is certain we have not
in the mind the idea which we are trying to have in it.[579] How
is it, then, that we proceed in the course of our endeavor, to
procure its introduction into the mind? If we have not the idea
itself, we have certain ideas connected with it. We run over
those ideas, one after another, in hopes that some one of them
will suggest the idea we are in quest of; and if any one of them
does, it is always one so connected with it as to call it up in the
way of association. I meet an old acquaintance, whose name I
do not remember, and wish to recollect. I run over a number of
names, in hopes that some of them may be associated with the
idea of the individual. I think of all the circumstances in which I
have seen him engaged; the time when I knew him, the
persons along with whom I knew him, the things he did, or the
things he suffered; and, if I chance upon any idea with which
the name is associated, then immediately I have the
recollection; if not, my pursuit of it is vain.[580] There is another
set of cases, very familiar, but affording very important evidence
on the subject. It frequently happens that there are matters
which we desire not to forget. What is the contrivance to which
we have recourse for preserving the memory—that is, for
making sure that it will be called into existence, when it is our
wish that it should? All men invariably employ the same
expedient. They endeavor to form an association between the
idea of the thing to be remembered, and some sensation, or
some idea, which they know beforehand will occur at or near
the time when they wish the remembrance to be in their minds.
If this association is formed, and the association or idea with
which it has been formed occurs; the sensation, or idea, calls up
 the remembrance; and the object of him who formed the
association is attained. To use a vulgar instance: a man receives
a commission from his friend, and, that he may not forget it,
ties a knot in his handkerchief. How is this fact to be explained?
First of all, the idea of the commission is associated with the
making of the knot. Next, the handkerchief is a thing which it is
known beforehand will be frequently seen, and of course at no
great distance of time from the occasion on which the memory
is desired. The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and
this sensation recalls the idea of the commission, between
which and itself the association had been purposely formed."
[581]

In short, we make search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as

we rummage our house for a lost object. In both cases we visit what
seems to us the probable neighborhood of that which we miss. We
turn over the things under which, or within which, or alongside of
which, it may possibly be; and if it lies near them, it soon comes to
view. But these matters, in the case of a mental object sought, are
nothing but its associates. The machinery of recall is thus the same
as the machinery of association, and the machinery of association,
as we know, is nothing but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-
centres.
And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also.
Retention means liability to recall, and it means nothing more than
such liability. The only proof of there being retention is that recall
actually takes place. The retention of an experience is, in short, but
another name for the possibility of thinking it again, or the tendency
to think it again, with its past surroundings. Whatever accidental cue
may turn this tendency into an actuality, the permanent ground of
the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by which the
cue calls up the experience on the proper occasion, together with its
past associates, the sense that the self was there, the belief that it
really happened, etc., etc., just as previously described. When the
recollection is of the 'ready' sort, the resuscitation takes place the
instant the occasion arises; when it is slow, resuscitation comes after
delay. But be the recall prompt or slow, the condition which makes it
possible at all (or in other words, the 'retention' of the experience) is
neither more nor less than the brain-paths which associate the
experience with the occasion and cue of the recall. When
slumbering, these paths are the condition of retention; when active,
they are the condition of recall.

A simple scheme will now make the whole

cause of memory plain. Let n be a past
event; o its 'setting' (concomitants, date,
self present, warmth and intimacy, etc.,
etc., as already set forth); and m some
present thought or fact which may
appropriately become the occasion of its Fig. 45.
recall. Let the nerve-centres, active in the
thought of m, n, and o, be represented by
M, N, and O, respectively; then the existence of the paths M—N and
N—O will be the fact indicated by the phrase 'retention of the event
n in the memory,' and the excitement of the brain along these paths
will be the condition of the event n's actual recall. The retention of
n, it will be observed, is no mysterious storing up of an 'idea' in an
unconscious state. It is not a fact of the mental order at all. It is a
purely physical phenomenon, a morphological feature, the presence
of these 'paths,' namely, in the finest recesses of the brain's tissue.
The recall or recollection, on the other hand, is a psycho-physical
phenomenon, with both a bodily and a mental side. The bodily side
is the functional excitement of the tracts and paths in question; the
mental side is the conscious vision of the past occurrence, and the
belief that we experienced it before.
These habit-worn paths of association are a clear rendering of what
authors mean by 'predispositions,' 'vestiges,' 'traces,' etc., left in the
brain by past experience. Most writers leave the nature of these
vestiges vague; few think of explicitly assimilating them to channels
of association. Dr. Maudsley, for example, writes:

"When an idea which we have once had is excited again, there

is a reproduction of the same nervous current, with the
conscious addition that it is a reproduction—it is the same idea
plus the consciousness that it is the same. The question then
suggests itself, What is the physical condition of this
consciousness? What is the modification of the anatomical
substrata of fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity,
which is the occasion of this plus element in the reproduced
idea? It may be supposed that the first activity did leave behind
it, when it subsided, some after-effect, some modification of the
nerve-element, whereby the nerve-circuit was disposed to fall
again readily into the same action; such disposition appearing in
consciousness as recognition or memory. Memory is, in fact, the
conscious phase of this physiological disposition when it
becomes active or discharges its functions on the recurrence of
the particular mental experience. To assist our conception of
what may happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements
to be endowed with their own consciousness, and let us assume
them to be, as I have supposed, modified in a certain way by
the first experience; it is hard to conceive that when they fall
into the same action on another occasion they should not
recognize or remember it; for the second action is a
reproduction of the first, with the addition of what it contains
from the after-effects of the first. As we have assumed the
process to be conscious, this reproduction with its addition
would be a memory or remembrance."[582]

In this passage Dr. Maudsley seems to mean by the 'nerve-element,'

or 'anatomical substratum of fibres and cells,' something that
corresponds to the N of our diagram. And the 'modification' he
speaks of seems intended to be understood as an internal
modification of this same particular group of elements. Now the
slightest reflection will convince anyone that there is no conceivable
ground for supposing that with the mere re-excitation of N there
should arise the 'conscious addition' that it is a re-excitation. The
two excitations are simply two excitations, their consciousnesses are
two consciousnesses, they have nothing to do with each other. And a
vague 'modification,' supposed to be left behind by the first
excitation, helps us not a whit. For, according to all analogy, such a
modification can only result in making the next excitation more
smooth and rapid. This might make it less conscious, perhaps, but
could not endow it with any reference to the past. The gutter is
worn deeper by each successive shower, but not for that reason
brought into contact with previous showers. Psychology (which Dr.
Maudsley in his next sentence says "affords us not the least help in
this matter") puts us on the track of an at least possible brain-
explanation. As it is the setting o of the idea, when it recurs, which
makes us conscious of it as past, so it can be no intrinsic
modification of the 'nerve-element' N which is the organic condition
of memory, but something extrinsic to it altogether, namely, its
connections with those other nerve-elements which we called O—
that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral substratum of a
great plexus of things other than the principal event remembered,
dates, names, concrete surroundings, realized intervals, and what
not. The 'modification' is the formation in the plastic nerve-
substance of the system of associative paths between N and O.
The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of inward
experience give countenance is that the brain-tracts excited by the
event proper, and those excited in its recall, are in part different
from each other. If we could revive the past event without any
associates we should exclude the possibility of memory, and simply
dream that we were undergoing the experience as if for the first
time.[583] Wherever, in fact, the recalled event does appear without
a definite setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of
fancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls associates
which gradually become more definite, it grows more and more
distinctly into a remembered thing. For example, I enter a friend's
room and see on the wall a painting. At first I have the strange,
wondering consciousness, 'surely I have seen that before,' but when
or how does not become clear. There only clings to the picture a sort
of penumbra of familiarity,—when suddenly I exclaim: "I have it, it is
a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Florentine Academy
—I recollect it there!" But the motive to the recall does not lie in the
fact that the brain-tract now excited by the painting was once before
excited in a similar way; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with
that brain-tract other tracts also are excited: those which sustain my
friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the one hand; those which
sustain the mental image of the Florence Academy, on the other
hand, with the circumstances of my visit there; and finally those
which make me (more dimly) think of the years I have lived through
between these two times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is
a thought with a peculiar object, namely, that I who now stand here
with this picture before me, stood so many years ago in the
Florentine Academy looking at its original.
M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image
develops into an object of memory, in his usual vivid fashion. He
says:

"I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am

acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him
before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers
about there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It
persists in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new
details. 'When I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-
jacket on, painting in a studio; he is so-and-so, of such-and-
such a street. But when was it? It was not yesterday, nor this
week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that he was waiting for
the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before
the spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day, people
carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm
Sunday!' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various
shiftings to front and rear along the line of the past; each of
these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When
 confronted with the present sensation and with the latent
swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the
figure first recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance.
Then, completed by precise details, and confronted with all the
shortened images by which we sum up the proceedings of a day
or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, beyond
yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the ill-
defined mass constituted by our recent recollections. Then
something said by the painter was recalled, and it at once
receded again beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked
by the image of the green leaves and denoted by the word
spring. A moment afterwards, thanks to a new detail, the
recollection of the branches, it has shifted again, but forward
this time, not backward; and, by a reference to the calendar, is
situated at a precise point, a week further back than Easter, and
five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of the
contrary impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other
backward, and which are, at a particular moment, annulled by
one another."[584]

THE CONDITIONS OF GOODNESS IN MEMORY.

The remembered fact being n, then, the path N—O is what arouses
for n its setting when it is recalled, and makes it other than a mere
imagination. The path M—N, on the other hand, gives the cue or
occasion of its being recalled at all. Memory being this altogether
conditioned on brain-paths, its excellence in a given individual will
depend partly on the number and partly on the persistence of these
paths.
The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physiological
property of the brain-tissue of the individual, whilst their number is
altogether due to the facts of his mental experience. Let the quality
of permanence in the paths be called the native tenacity, or
physiological retentiveness. This tenacity differs enormously from
infancy to old age, and from one person to another. Some minds are
like wax under a seal—no impression, however disconnected with
others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every touch, but
under usual conditions retain no permanent mark. These latter
minds, before they can recollect a fact, must weave it into their
permanent stores of knowledge. They have no desultory memory.
Those persons, on the contrary, who retain names, dates and
addresses, anecdotes, gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of
miscellaneous facts, without an effort, have desultory memory in a
high degree, and certainly owe it to the unusual tenacity of their
brain-substance for any path once formed therein. No one probably
was ever effective on a voluminous scale without a high degree of
this physiological retentiveness. In the practical as in the theoretic
life, the man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always
achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors, spending most of
their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten,
simply hold their own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter
Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions of
mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely
physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness may excel in the
quality of their work at this point or at that, but will never do such
mighty sums of it, or be influential contemporaneously on such a
scale.[585]
But there comes a time of life for all of us when we can do no more
than hold our own in the way of acquisitions, when the old paths
fade as fast as the new ones form in our brain, and when we forget
in a week quite as much as we can learn in the same space of time.
This equilibrium may last many, many years. In extreme old age it is
upset in the reverse direction, and forgetting prevails over
acquisition or rather there is no acquisition. Brain-paths are so
transient that in the course of a few minutes of conversation the
same question is asked and its answer forgotten half a dozen times.
Then the superior tenacity of the paths formed in childhood
becomes manifest: the dotard will retrace the facts of his earlier
years after he has lost all those of later date.
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