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, by giving us the consciousness of change, make us dimly aware of the numerical richness of our experiences.  But, however this be, there is no doubt that, in glancing back on such a succession of exciting transitions of mental condition, time appears to expand enormously, just as it does in looking back on our dream-experience, or that rapid series of intensified feelings which, according to De Quincey and others, is produced by certain narcotics.

The reason of this is plain.  Such a type of successive experience offers to the retrospective imagination a large number of distinguishable points, and since this mode of estimating time depends, as we have seen, on the extent of the process of filling in, time will necessarily appear long in this case.  On the other hand, when we have been engaged in very ordinary pursuits, in which few deeply interesting or exciting events have impressed themselves on memory, our retrospective picture will necessarily be very much of a blank, and consequently the duration of the period will seem to be short.

I observed that this retrospective appreciation of time depended on the degree of connection between the successive experiences.  This condition is very much the same as the other just given, namely, the degree of uniformity of the experiences, since the more closely the successive stages of the experience are connected—­as when, for example, we are going through our daily routine of work—­the more quiet and unexciting will be the transition from each stage to its succeeding one.  And on the other hand, all novelty of impression and exciting transition of experience clearly involves a want of connection.  Wundt thinks the retrospective estimate of a connected series of experiences, such as those of our daily round of occupations, is defective just because the effort of attention, which precedes even an imaginative reproduction of an impression, so quickly accommodates itself in this case to each of the successive steps, whereas, when the experiences to be recalled are disconnected, the effort requires more time.  In this way, the estimate of a past duration would be coloured by the sense of time accompanying the reproductive process itself.  This may very likely be the case, yet I should be disposed to attach most importance to the number of distinguishable items of experience recalled.

Our representation of the position of a given event in the past is, as I have tried to show, determined by the movement of imagination in going back to it from the present.  And this is the same thing as to say that it depends on our retrospective sense of the intervening space.  That is to say, the sense of distance in time, as in space, is the recognition of a term to a movement.  And just as the distance of an object will seem greater when there are many intervening objects affording points of measurement, than when there are none (as on the uniform surface of the sea), so the distance of an event will vary with the number of recognized intervening points.