ABSTRACT
The purpose of this Chapter is to consider those features of crude experience which form the raw material of the concept of time, which has to go through a long elaboration before it is fit to appear in physics or history. There are two sources of our belief in time; the first is the perception of change within one specious present, the other is memory. When you look at your watch, you can see the second-hand moving, but only memory tells you that the minute-hand and hour-hand have moved. Shakespeare’s timepieces had no second-hand, as appears from the lines:
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d.
