Note note 29 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

29 As is shewn in the text. Time is a name for the aggregate of the successions of our feelings, apart from the feelings themselves. I object, however, in the case of time, as I did in the case of Space, to considering it as an abstract term. Time does not seem to me to be a name (as the author says) for the pastness, the presentness, and the futureness of our successive feelings. It is rather, I think, a collective name for our feeling of their succession—for what the author called, in a previous section, the part of the process “which consists in being sensible of their successiveness,” for which part, he then said, “we have not a name.” This taking notice of the successiveness of our feelings, whether we prefer to call it a part of the feelings themselves, or another feeling superadded to them, is yet something which, in the entire mass of feeling which the successive impressions give us, we are able to discriminate, and to name apart from the rest. A perception of succession between two feelings is a state of consciousness per se, which though we cannot think of it separately from the feelings, we can yet think of as a completed thing in itself, and not as an attribute of either or both of the two feelings. Its name, if it had one, would be a concrete name. But the entire series of these perceptions of succession has a name, Time; which I therefore hold to be a concrete name.

However inextricably these feelings of succession are mixed up with the feelings perceived as successive, we are so perfectly able to attend to them, and make them a distinct object of thought, that we can compare them with one another, without comparing the successive feelings in any other respect. We can judge two or more successions to be of equal, or of unequal, rapidity. And if we find any series of feelings of which the successive links follow each other with uniform rapidity, such as the tickings of a clock, we can make this a standard of comparison for all other successions, and measure them as equal to one, two, three, or some other number of links of this series: whereby the aggregate Time is said to be divided into equal portions, and every event is located in some one of those portions. The succession of our sensations, therefore, however closely implicated with the sensations themselves, may be abstracted from them in thought, as completely as any quality of a thing can be abstracted from the thing.

The apparent infinity of Time the author, very rightly, explains in the same manner as that of Space.—Ed.