PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

permanent than an ordinary statute.
A presumption about time enters widely into our opinions. To one
person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious
life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it
is ephemeral. Geological time is very different from biological time.
Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to
calculate for the emergency or for the long run. Some decisions have
to be made on the basis of what will happen in the next two hours;
others on what will happen in a week, a month, a season, a decade,
when the children have grown up, or their children's children. An
important part of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the
time-conception that properly belongs to the thing in hand. The person
who uses the wrong time-conception ranges from the dreamer who ignores
the present to the philistine who can see nothing else. A true scale
of values has a very acute sense of relative time.
Distant time, past and future, has somehow to be conceived. But as
James says, "of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing'
sense." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 638.]
The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the
"specious present." It endures, according to Titchener, for about six
seconds. [Footnote: Cited by Warren, _Human Psychology_, p. 255.]
"All impressions within this period of time are present to us _at
once_. This makes it possible for us to perceive changes and events
as well as stationary objects. The perceptual present is supplemented
by the ideational present. Through the combination of perceptions with
memory images, entire days, months, and even years of the past are
brought together into the present."
In this ideational present, vividness, as James said, is proportionate
to the number of discriminations we perceive within it. Thus a
vacation in which we were bored with nothing to do passes slowly while
we are in it, but seems very short in memory. Great activity kills
time rapidly, but in memory its duration is long. On the relation
between the amount we discriminate and our time perspective James has
an interesting passage: [Footnote: _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 639.]
"We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ
enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and
in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged
in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in
changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length
of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10 as
now; [Footnote: In the moving picture this effect is admirably produced
by the ultra-rapid camera.] if our life were then destined to hold the
same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should
live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of