the contrary, that this feeling distinctly colours the
retrospective appreciation. Thus, when waiting at a railway station for
a belated train, I am distinctly aware that each quarter of an hour
looks long, not only as it passes, but when it is over. In fact, I am
disposed to express my feeling as one of disappointment that only so
short an interval has passed since I last looked at my watch.

Nevertheless, I am ready to allow that, though a feeling of tedium, or
the contrary feeling of irritation at the rapidity of time, will linger
for an appreciable interval and colour the retrospective estimate of
time, this backward view is chiefly determined by other considerations.
As Wundt remarks, we have no sense of time's slowness during sleep, yet
on waking we imagine that we have been dreaming for an immensely long
period. This retrospective appreciation is determined by the number and
the degree or intensity of the experiences, and, what comes very much to
the same thing, by the amount of unlikeness, freshness, and
discontinuity characterizing these experiences.

Time, as I have already hinted, is known under the form of a succession
of different conscious experiences. Unbroken uniformity would give us no
sense of time, because it would give us no conscious experience at all.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a perfectly uniform mental
state extending through an appreciable duration. In looking at one and
the same object, even in listening to one and the same tone, I am in no
two successive fractions of a second in exactly the same state of mind.
Slight alterations in the strength of the sensation,[123] in the degree
or direction of attention, and in the composition of that penumbra of
vague images which it calls up, occur at every distinguishable fraction
of time.

This being so, it would seem to follow that the greater the number of
clearly marked changes, and the more impressive and exciting these
transitions, the fuller will be our sense of time. And this is borne out
by individual reflection. When striking and deeply interesting events
follow one another very rapidly, as when we are travelling, duration
appears to swell out.

It is possible that such a succession of stirring experiences may beget
a vague consciousness of time at each successive moment, and apart from
retrospection, simply by force of the change. In other words, without
our distinctly attending to time, a series of novel impressions might