ABSTRACT

The relationship between consciousness and time was a source of fascination and puzzlement among both philosophers and psychologists in the final decades of the nineteenth century. German psychologists played a prominent role in these debates, and William Stern was one such. Stern was a student of Ebbinghaus and spent the bulk of his career as Professor of Psychology, first at Breslau, then at Hamburg. In his early years, he was a leading figure in differential psychology and, among other things, invented the IQ test. He published just one article on temporal experience, "Psychische Prasenzzeit". Stern begins "Mental presence-time" by observing that psychology, like other sciences, has to work with complex unities, and he suggests a criterion for genuine as opposed to fictitious conscious unity: it exists when mental contents are immediately apprehended as belonging or occurring together. The study of temporal "grouping" in music, speech perception and action has subsequently proved a fruitful one for psychologists interested in time-perception.