Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/147

122 these successive facts, so that when this binding has taken place we then recognize the whole fagot of experience as a single succession. This account of the temporal facts, in terms of an activity called a synthesis, helps me, as I must confess, no whit. What I find in consciousness is that a succession, such as a rhythm of drum-beats, a musical phrase, a verse of poetry, comes to me as one present whole, present in the sense that I know it all at once. And I also find that this succession is such that it has within it a temporal distinction, or order, of earlier and later elements. While these elements are at once known, they are also known as such that at the briefer instant within the succession when any one of them is to be temporally viewed as a present fact, none of the others are contemporaneous with that fact, but all are either no longer or not yet when, and in so far as, that element is taken as the present one. And I cannot make this datum of experience any more definite by calling it a synthesis, or the mere result of a synthesis.

I have now characterized the more directly given features in our consciousness of succession. You see. as a result, that we men experience what Professor James, and others, have called our “specious present,” as a serial whole, within which there are observed temporal differences of former and latter. And this our “specious present” has, when measured by a reference to time-keepers, a length which varies with circumstances, but which appears to be never any very small fraction of a second, and never more than a very few seconds in length. I have earlier referred to this