=Appreciation of Longer Durations.=--In the experience of watching empty time flow--'empty' to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth--we tell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud. This composition out of units of duration is called the law of time's _discrete flow_. The discreteness is, however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts of _recognition_ or _apperception_ of _what_ it is are discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be. All continuous sensations are _named_ in beats. We notice that a certain finite 'more' of them is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson's image, the sensation is the measuring-tape, the perception the dividing-engine which stamps its length. As we listen to a steady sound, we _take it in_ in discrete pulses of recognition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the same!' The case stands no otherwise with time.
After a small number of beats our impression of the amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic conception. When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as a _name_, or by running over a few salient _dates_ therein, with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like a _perception_ of the greater length of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth. To an historian, it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so appear a more _multitudinous_ thing. And for the same reason most people will think they directly perceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that of the past week. But there is properly no comparative time-_intuition_ in these cases at all. It is but dates and events representing time, their abundance symbolizing its length. I am sure that this is so, even where the times compared are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same with spaces of many miles, which we always compare with each other by the numbers that measure them.