Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/139

114 definite kinds of consciousness. The next aspect of the matter lies in the fact that our consciousness of change, wherever it is definite and wherever it accompanies definite successive acts of attention, goes along with the consciousness that for us something comes first, and something next, or that there is what we call a Succession of events. Of such successions, melodies, rhythms, and series of words or of other simple acts form familiar and typical examples. An elementary consciousness of change without such definite successions we can indeed have; but where we observe clearly what a particular change is, it is a change wherein one fact succeeds another.

A succession, as thus more directly experienced by us, involves a certain well-known relation amongst the events that make up the succession. Together these events form a temporal sequence or order. Each one of them is over and past when the next one comes. And this order of the experienced time-series has a determinate direction. The succession passes from each event to its successor, and not in the reverse direction; so that herein the observed time relations notoriously differ from what we view as space relations. For if in space b is next to ɑ, we can read the relation equally well as a coexistence of ɑ with b, and as a coexistence of b with ɑ. But in case b succeeds ɑ, as one word succeeds another in a spoken sentence, then the relation is experienced as a passing from ɑ to b, or as a passing over of ɑ into b, in such wise that ɑ is past, as an event, before b comes. This direction of the stream of time forms one of its most notable empirical characters. It is obviously related to that